The Chinese Players Living Inside Google's Game World

Almost without anyone noticing, Google has built a game that 10 million people play.

Agent "Pound Sign" (Jinghao) had a top-secret mission. A head-on clash was set for March 28, and to prepare for it he took a train to Shanghai a week early, carrying the digital key to a building in western China.

When Pound Sign arrived in Shanghai, another agent, Kelvin, had already flown in from Hong Kong to meet him. Kelvin brought a key from Malaysia.

Kelvin and Pound Sign belong to the same organization, the "Resistance." On the 27th, a week after the two met, more than 20 agents from the opposing side, the "Enlightened," boarded the same flight from Beijing to Guangzhou to get ready for the next day's showdown.

At 12:58 p.m. on March 28, the battle began at Huacheng Square in Guangzhou. More than 600 people from both sides joined in, and the surrounding high-rises changed hands again and again. On the strategic map, key positions flipped back and forth between the Resistance's blue and the Enlightened's green.

For all the fierce fighting, to a bystander the so-called battle looked a little ridiculous. Most of the 600-plus people in the square said nothing. They ran up to buildings while staring at their phones. Sometimes they held their phones in both hands and shuffled forward, back, left and right; sometimes they stood perfectly still, tapping tensely at the screen. Most wore blue or green T-shirts, and some carried flags printed with strange symbols. When they tried to take a group photo, they briefly alarmed the square's security guards. The crowd behaved oddly, yet all they were doing was gathering together and... playing on their phones.

The scene in Guangzhou on March 28. Pictured is a small squad of the blue team. Photo from Ka Hei Chan on Google+

Indeed, there was no clash of words or fists at all. "It was just a crowd of people in Huacheng Square swiping at their phones in front of different buildings," said Alexrowe, a Resistance team leader who took part in the battle, laughing.

The app that drew more than 600 people from across the country is called Ingress, a location-based game made by Niantic Labs, a game studio inside Google.

Put simply, Ingress lays a virtual world over the routes you travel every day. If you want to attack a target 10 kilometers away, you have to travel those 10 kilometers yourself.

In the world Ingress imagines, the air is full of an exotic, energy-bearing substance called XM, which players collect by walking or cycling around. The first time you open the game, you must choose one of two factions, the Enlightened or the Resistance. This is the only choice in the game that involves the story: the Enlightened see XM as a good thing that will guide humanity's evolution and progress; the Resistance fear that XM will control and enslave humans.

An agent's job is to "claim territory" for their faction. Ingress turns real sculptures and buildings around you into "Portals," and these are what the two sides fight over.

To claim territory, you open the Ingress app and walk to within 40 meters of a Portal to install "Resonators." Portals taken by the Enlightened turn green; those held by the Resistance turn blue. That is why the two armies are also known simply as the Greens and the Blues.

Screenshots from Ingress. On the left, a Green is installing a Resonator; on the right are Portals held by the Blues or the Greens, with white ones neutral, not yet taken by either side. The small light-blue dots are XM floating in the air. Behind it all is a real city map.

Ingress is a global game. To keep its community lively, Google picks several cities each month to host group Ingress events. The March 28 event at Huacheng Square was one of them. Its code name was "Shonin" (Japanese for "witness"); the main battlefield was Kyoto, Japan, and Guangzhou was the only satellite city in China to join the fight. At this official offline event, Pound Sign became a hero of the Blues, thanks to his "territory claiming."

At 1:57 p.m. on the 28th, Pound Sign and another Blue agent, AterLiu, linked up a transnational blue triangle, a control field connecting western China, Sabah in Malaysia, and Ninghai County in Zhejiang. Every Portal involved in the Guangzhou fighting now sat inside a vast sea of blue. The move earned the Blues in Guangzhou a 200-point bonus and indirectly won them the offline battle.

Coverage map of southern China that day. Image from Google+

AterLiu, who helped plan the giant control field, did a tally afterward: the Blues in the south had spent a month preparing. In all, 95 Blues from Chengdu, Lushan, Anhui, Zhejiang and elsewhere cleared obstacles in advance, so that no blue or green links or control fields stood between Ninghai and Lhasa. "Quite a few people changed their flights, drove out into the countryside, or tore down control fields they had worked hard to build," said Lucia, a Blue who helped coordinate the clearing.

At the main battlefield in Kyoto, though, March 28 belonged to the Greens. At 2 p.m., Japan's Greens linked up a huge green control field stretching from northeastern Taiwan in the south to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the north, covering most of Japan. Seen on Google Maps, the field even shows the curvature of the Earth. The teamwork and obstacle clearing it required are easy to imagine.

Image from Huang Nuo

That is Ingress. Other mobile games keep your attention on the screen; Ingress drags you out into the real world. And because it gives people the thrill of "occupying real buildings," it is also seen as a game for people with delusions of grandeur, and as a game that gets shut-ins out of the house.

To a bystander, Ingress's appeal may be hard to understand. To join the battle, 600 players from Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere paid their own fares to fly to Guangzhou. Among them were college students who skipped class and office workers who took time off for it. Behind them were hundreds, even thousands, of Greens and Blues who spent a month running around their own neighborhoods so their side could link up a big control field on March 28.

Because it is a Google product, Ingress cannot be accessed normally in China, and players have to solve the "technical" problem themselves. Even so, plenty of people in China keep playing, and many make it the center of their spare time.

Ingress is a "hard" game to play in China

"What defines Ingress players is that they take everything seriously," a player who goes by the pen name Jiuhou told QDaily. She has played for less than a year; her day job is reporter at the tech news site Geek Park.

Indeed, Ingress comes with a technical barrier in China. Sometimes you have to pay anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred yuan for a VPN. More often money is not the problem; the problem is finding a way to stay connected. Worse, a VPN or similar service slows down access to Chinese websites and services.

As a result, most Ingress players in China work in IT or internet-adjacent industries. People in IT, advertising and new media, along with students in IT-related majors, were the players we met most often.

For most Ingress agents, foreign services and software have long been part of daily life. Ethan, a Green at Beijing University of Technology, told QDaily that besides Ingress he also uses Facebook, Twitter and other services. Using internet services that "do not exist" in China has been his habit since he started high school.

EthanZ is now a sophomore in Beijing, and he too is a stickler. When explaining Ingress terms to QDaily, he would repeat each official term in careful English pronunciation, to make sure nothing got lost between the Chinese and the English.

There are many more examples of this seriousness. Although Google services are hard to use in China, the Greens in Beijing still talk to each other on Google's messaging app, Hangouts. Blues in Beijing, Hong Kong and elsewhere have each built websites that teach new players how to get started and level up quickly. Newcomers who join the Beijing Blue group can also get face-to-face "training" from veteran members nearby. Here is the souvenir pack I was given during my interviews: postcards and cards that players made themselves for the March 28 event in Guangzhou.

Souvenirs from the March 28 battle in Guangzhou

Ingress and getting out of the house

Ingress is at heart a location-based war game, but there are gentler ways to play it. Beyond combat, Ingress awards virtual badges for all kinds of achievements, and almost any action a player keeps repeating can earn one.

Afio, a Green player in Beijing, likes nothing better than taking Portals he has never visited. They might be a small sculpture downstairs you never noticed, or a building you would never normally go to.

Afio works in product operations at a Beijing internet company and started playing after Ingress came out on the iPhone in July 2014. Other Greens call him "God of War" because for a while he played like a man possessed. For him, this is an ordinary weekend afternoon's exercise: walk from Dongzhimen to Taiyanggong in Beijing and back, taking Portals along the way, about 12 kilometers round trip. He kept running into Portals that were stone lion sculptures, which got him interested in stone lions and in architecture; he went on to read 50 books on architecture.

In January this year, to take a new Portal, Afio went to Longquan Temple in Miyun County, 92 kilometers north of Beijing, and signed up for its "IT Zen Camp," listening to lectures on Buddhism while capturing Portals. He now knows the grounds of Beijing's "six great altars" (the Altar of Land and Grain, the Temple of Agriculture, the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Earth, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Moon) inside out. Once, to take a new Portal, he even walked a loop through the cemetery at Babaoshan. So far, Afio has visited 5,224 different Portals.

Perhaps even Afio has forgotten that before Ingress he was a homebody who hated going out. "You couldn't even get him out the door" is how he used to be.

A more extreme example comes from the United States. Trevor Clunn, an American player, was overweight and tired of ordinary exercise. After a year of Ingress, which kept sending him outdoors, he has dropped from 135 kilograms to 72.

Photos of Trevor Clunn before and after playing Ingress

About the "Guardian" badge

Of all Ingress's badges, the black "Guardian" badge matters most to players. It means you have protected a Portal from enemy attack for 150 days. In the early days, you needed it to reach higher levels. To earn it, many players take remote, little-visited Portals and maintain them every day; Chinese players call these "achievement Portals."

At 11 p.m. on December 30 last year, Big Cat Caaat, a Blue player from Beijing, was hit by a speeding taxi while on a business trip in Xiamen, and died. Minutes before the crash, he had captured a Portal called "Egg Face" near Huandao Road in Xiamen. Blues and Greens alike agreed to leave this last Portal of his untouched. On April 12, the Portal, still listing Caaat as its owner, passed 150 days and earned the black "Guardian" badge, the highest tier.

How Ingress began

Ingress began as an "internal startup" at Google. It was led by John Hanke, founder of Keyhole, a former 3D Earth-mapping company, and founder of the Google Earth project.

In 2004, Google bought Keyhole, which later grew into Google's Earth-viewing project, Google Earth, and Hanke joined Google with it. For several years after that he kept a low profile. In 2011, Hanke had an idea for a game and wanted to quit and start a company again, but Google CEO Larry Page persuaded him to stay. The result was Niantic Labs, the company that developed Ingress. In 2012, at the height of the augmented-reality craze set off by Google Glass, Hanke combined augmented reality with Google's strength in map data and launched Ingress.

Players abroad may come closer to experiencing Ingress as it is meant to work: it starts with a story told in fiction, there are offline events, and the winning side of those events (Blue or Green) in turn shapes the story and the players who follow it. Unlike games that put out merchandise or novels only after they become hits, Ingress develops its spin-offs alongside the game itself.

From the end of 2012, a weekly YouTube show, the Ingress Report, covered Ingress offline events around the world and the story changes players brought about through them. At almost the same time, a mysterious Niantic Labs website went live, posting new clues to the Ingress backstory every week.

In March 2013, Niantic Labs teamed up with the media company @lantis to publish an Ingress-themed science-fiction novel, The Alignment Ingress, about a TV director named John Hank (could the resemblance to founder John Hanke's name really be a coincidence?) who can sense XM. Two months later, a second novel about Niantic Labs, The Niantic Project: Ingress, came out. Not long ago there were even rumors that Google might make a TV series for Ingress fans.

Beyond its competitive appeal, Ingress owes some of its popularity to these spin-offs and offline events. QDaily has also learned that Niantic Labs brought in outside media companies to produce content from the very start of the project.

Thomas Greanias is a popular novelist. In 2012 he attended a "creative exchange" held by Niantic Labs in Beverly Hills, California, and his company, @lantis Media, became one of the first media companies brought onto the Ingress project team.

The partnership continues, and Greanias is still writing new spin-off novels about Ingress characters.

"There's some early discussion of the game's framework, but the plots of the novels and the personalities of the characters are ultimately up to us. For consistency, Niantic Labs has the final say on character names and book titles," Greanias, author of The Alignment Ingress, told QDaily.

For all the people and money spent building and running Ingress, the game's "fair" design means it cannot make Google much money. Unlike games that encourage players to buy a sense of achievement in a virtual world, Ingress sells nothing at all, and because locations in the game match the real world, no amount of money lets you teleport. So far we have seen only a few small attempts to make money from it:

• The French insurer AXA partnered with Ingress: the game released a shield item called the AXA Shield, and AXA's 20,000 branches worldwide became Portals in Ingress; players who hack one of these Portals can get the AXA Shield.
• Hint, a fruit-flavored water brand, hid Ingress codes in its drinks; buy the water, enter the code, and you get an Ingress item pack.
• Sennheiser released Ingress editions of its Momentum headphones, in blue and green to represent the Resistance and the Enlightened.

Perhaps Google keeps spending because Ingress fans are so devoted. Ingress has been downloaded 10 million times worldwide and reached 7 million players by the end of last year, making it the world's largest LBS (location-based service) game. For many "hardcore" players, more than 10 hours a day in the game is nothing unusual.

"Because I didn't have to sit in an office, I spent most of every day playing Ingress," said Green agent Afio. Last year he worked from parks and other places thick with Portals, answering email or taking work calls on his phone, and carried four power banks to keep the phone charged all day.

For many players, what keeps them going is real contact with other players. Unlike browser games and other mobile games, Ingress pulls players out to real places instead of holding them hostage at a computer desk. For most of the people we interviewed, whether a Portal is blue or green may not be what matters most; what matters is the people they have met through the game.

Play Ingress, Blue or Green, and you will run into other players often, near the same Portal or when the other side attacks yours. In reporting this story, QDaily heard many such tales:

JoYJY and Nihiler, a Green couple in Beijing, got together at an offline event in Beijing last May. "Rabbit," a Blue in Guangzhou, received a love letter on Google+ from Hong Kong after the March 28 battle, from someone she had met only briefly that day.

BigError, a Green who works in advertising in Beijing, told QDaily that apart from work and time with his wife, Ingress takes up most of his free time. "After 30, two things changed my life: photography and Ingress," said "dengdage," a Blue who works in IT pre-sales in Beijing. Much of his social life and spare time now goes to Ingress. Last year he even helped plan a marriage proposal for another Blue, Alexrowe.

Elsewhere in the world, Ingress players, Blue and Green together, create artworks out of Portal links: hearts, flying dragons, flowers, pumpkins... They are like crop circles drawn over cities.

At least so far, Ingress project lead John Hanke has achieved the goal he set for the game:

We hope the game encourages people to get out, explore, and meet other agents. That is what satisfies us most.