I have been playing for one month. Like with any new game, I binged at the start, but after witnessing the people who take Ingress really seriously, I had a powerful epiphany about what I did not want for my life. On the other hand, it is an amusing way to gamify going for a … Continue reading A Month in Ingress, by the Numbers
Friends started playing Ingress and invited us to join them on the losing team (Enlightened). I leaped at the chance, of course. Ingress is a Google-made augmented reality game, which is to say you use your mobile device to interact with your environment. The gameplay looks minimal. It is Foursquare or geocaching with a sci … Continue reading Ingress
Ingress has been e-mailing me a lot lately. They are getting around to reviewing some of the portal submissions I made two years ago. Apparently quite a few of them are duplicates now. There is nothing in the e-mails to stop these notifications. I think I would need to re-download the game and update settings. … Continue reading Portal Review
I uninstalled two of my mobile games. That gives me some openings if anyone wants to recommend more. Pathfinder Adventures has always been buggy, but occasionally you forfeit a game because it gets stuck and cannot advance, oh well. I started seriously playing through Story mode after Quest mode was stuck with that sort of … Continue reading Dealbreakers
Where Ingress was structured almost entirely around portals, Pokémon Go has incentives both to seek out those same locations and to head away from them. This is healthier on several levels. Ingress’s portals are Pokémon Go’s gyms and PokéStops. Gyms are the PvP spots, and PvP seems much narrower in Pokémon Go. You can control … Continue reading Incentives and Locations
Pokémon Go released last week. You probably already know this. Pokémon Go comes from Niantic, makers of Ingress. All that data Ingress players collected was then used as the basis for a new game. People are laughing about how many churches have been tagged as Pokémon gyms. All those Ingress portals are now gyms and … Continue reading Portals and Pokéstops
In recent months players have been submitting an average of one million questions a day to Trivia Crack’s “Question Factory,†a section within the app, says its 29-year-old founder and chief executive, Maximo Cavazzani. Since each submission must get a positive rating from at least 100 fellow players to make the cut, only about 1,500 … Continue reading Bandwidth
Before the age of digital cameras, it was said that the average American family went through two rolls of film per year (summer vacation, Christmas). You probably have some good photos from your youth, but those were what was worth saving after removing two with the lens cap on, three with a thumb over the … Continue reading Feedback Time
A first order preference is what you want or like. You want pie. A second order preference is your preference about your preferences. You also want to lose weight, so you do not want to want pie. You can keep going to higher orders, where you might run into ambivalence as you miss being interested … Continue reading Second Order Preferences
A first order preference is what you want or like. You want pie. A second order preference is your preference about your preferences. You also want to lose weight, so you do not want to want pie. You can keep going to higher orders, where you might run into ambivalence as you miss being interested … Continue reading Second Order Preferences