Image by Grok
I sometimes consider renaming this site Your Retired Tax Matters Partner. That is a sort of warning that despite the fact that everything becomes a tax issue eventually, some of the posts will have no discernible tax connection. This one is an example of that.
I started working on this piece a long time ago. As I note, I have been on again, off again with Ingress. I started sometime in 2016. I have been in a really long off again phase except for a few days in 2025. The point of telling you all that is to admit that information about how the game works is pretty dated. – PJR
About Ingress
So there is this game called Ingress. You play it on your phone. It is location based. What you see on your phone is a rough map of the area you are in maybe a quarter mile or so in diameter. There are colored dots – white, blue, green and red. Those are the portals. They represent objects in the real environment. Public buildings like police stations and libraries, monuments and markers of all sorts among others. Players of the game can take pictures which they transmit to nominate items to be considered portals.
The picture above gives you two examples of what you would see on your phone as you are walking about. The third screen represents your inventory. That gold circle is centered on where the player is standing, They can do things to the portals that are within the circles. The tiny white dots represent the energy (exotic matter) that fuels your efforts.
What You Need To Know About The Lore
There is an elaborate science fiction story behind ingress. It is a war between the “Enlightened” (green) and the “Resistance” (blue).
As far as I can tell players pay practically zero attention to the lore. To them the struggle is between frogs and smurfs.
Playing The Game
When you are near enough to a portal you can “hack” it which will get you AP points. You will also get stuff that goes into your inventory. There are a large number of possible things you can get, but to save time we will just mention blasters, resonators and keys. If you are near a site and it is owned by the other team you can use your blasters to destroy their resonators. How many blasts it takes will vary. If you destroy them all the site goes neutral (white). When you are near a neutral site, regardless of how it got that way, you can put resonators on it, which converts it to your faction. There are eight slots that can be filled. You can also upgrade slots that are already filled either by you or somebody else on your team with a higher level resonator. There are only two teams in the whole world. You pick when you join.
The portal which now belongs to your team starts out fully powered, but that will erode over time. Just from sitting there the portal can turn back to neutral. While standing nearby you can charge the portal. Of course that uses your energy which you can replenish from walking around, but there are also energy cubes that you might get while hacking. You can also get energy by recycling things you get from hacking that you don’t have use for. If you have a key to the portal you can charge it remotely and see what is going on with that portal.
The big thing that a key to a portal does is that it allows you to create a link. And now we are getting what is arguably the object of this game. If you stand near a fully equipped portal of your faction you can create a link to another fully equipped portal if you have a key to the distant portal. The link is a line on the map in your factions color. It can be quite long. The longest link I ever create was 186km. You no longer have the key in your inventory. If either one of the portals is knocked below a certain number of resonators the key will drop to the virtual ground and be available to be picked up.
If you throw two links from a portal you can now get to what seems to be the ultimate goal. You have to now go to one of those portals that you just linked to and you need a key to the other distant portal. When you use that to create a link a field is created. The whole area in the triangular field is now your team’s color and you are told how many mind units the field controls. The ratio between mind units and geographic size of the field is related to population density. The biggest field I ever created had over 6,000 mind units. More typical is a field of the minimum size of 1.
The big limitation in all this is that links can’t cross one another, Also the length of the links is limited based on the level of equipment on the originating portal. To play the game really seriously and create enormous fields requires teaming up with other people and there is quite a bit of socializing encouraged by Ingress from what I understand. I really never got involved in that. One time I met up with another player and he showed me a few things and I’ve looked at some bulletin boards and the like, but for me and I suspect for quite a few other players it is a solitary pursuit.
My World
I live in North Oxford MA, birthplace of Clara Barton and like most New England towns it has clusters of portals here and there and some blank spots. It would be really something to throw a 186km link around here. Around here the links are often measured in meters and fields with mind units over 100 feel like a bit of an achievement. I like to walk so to me walking distance is about a mile and a half. There are about twenty portals within walking distance and as interest in Ingress seems to have waned they are reliably blue. I’m a resistance guy or a smurf it you will.
Ingress sometimes annoys my partner. When you go to historic sites and national parks there are a ton of portals and she would give me a hard time for looking at my phone instead of the beautiful vistas. I’ve quit a couple of times and then eased back in.
Meeting The Enemy
Anyway that is all background for the story I want to tell. One of the things that I did was make my partner’s sensibilities part of the game as far as I was concerned. Being retired we are together a lot so it is rare for me to be out and about driving. That meant that I could generally only do serious Ingress work on walks that I took by myself. One day I had strolled to the church at the corner of Pleasant Street and Route 56.
There were two portals. The sign out front and a gazebo in the back. They were at the limit of what I considered my turf and they were green. I started blasting way and was getting nowhere. Then I diagnosed the problem. There was a car with a couple in my age bracket pulled over by the church sign and they were on their phones. I went over to chat. That is how I, riles52, met VitalTreasure and AuntieEm, agents of the so called enlightenment. We chatted a bit. I confirmed that they did not pay any attention to the lore either.
A Declaration Of Territory
VitalTreasure indicated that he considered the church a significant part of his domain, but that he was willing to leave the rest of my walking distance territory to me. I thought that was a bit odd. It gets pretty boring when nobody attacks the portals near me. And it makes it hard to get APs to level up. The Enlightened agents can’t kill me although you can find stories on Reddit of people getting passionate about the Ingress sites and things getting out of hand.
Anyway I didn’t make a specific commitment or anything, but I decided to leave the church alone for a while. After a few weeks I made an elaborate plan to attack it with specialized equipment. I was amazed to find that within an hour or so the church was recaptured and most of my walking distance sites had been knocked out, As time went by I started to notice that if I hit one of their sites there would always be retaliation and I pretty well doped out their presumed territory. We communicated a bit through the chat function. There was one time that we were in Tennessee in the same place they had been and they sort of said hello.
I have some imagination in a sort of restricted way. I ended up creating a narrative that it really was “the resistance”. I was outnumbered two to one. My adversary seemed to be ever vigilant. And they had better transportation. And I had my refuge where they did not go roughly twenty portals or so.
The Confrontation
Then there came a day when it all came together. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had visited my daughter who lives in Millbury with her mother, my ex-wife. I tended to go there by a less than efficient route that takes me through the center of Oxford which is rich in Ingress portals, mainly monuments and public buildings. I had been stockpiling blasters, so I parked my car across from the town hall and went on a shooting spree. After about twenty minutes when I was ready to pack it in. I had probably converted ten or so portals to the Resistance. And then the most amazing thing happened.
A car pulled up and a guy who I recognized as Vital Treasure got out and started walking towards me I smiled and waved, but his aura seemed to indicate that he was pissed. I wish I could give it to you word for word, but what he conveyed to me was that he was mad at me for blowing up his resonators. My response was that he was going to get a lot of APs flipping them back and wasn’t that what the game was about. He indicated that he didn’t care about APs because he was already Level 16 (the maximum). To get a little metaphorical he was sort of maintaining the center of Oxford as a sort of Ingress garden.
Don (I had introduced myself and gotten his first name) didn’t mind dirty hacking, a concept which was new to me. I interpreted it to mean me hacking his sites for loot. He was very upset about my attacking them. It happened that we were getting ready for an RV trip, so I promised that I would not touch his sites for three months and suggested that we might get together for a cup of coffee at Carl’s Diner (an Ingress site of course) for coffee sometime. (Carl’s Diner was advertising itself with a pink bus several miles away at the intersection of Routes 56 and Route 20. The bus stayed parked there long enough to become an Ingress site. It has since been moved much closer to the diner. I have no clue as to how that has changed things in Ingress.)
Time Passes
For the next few months I would often think about Don (VitalTreasure) and his battle buddy presumably spouse AuntieEm. Based on my experience with him he had to have spent a lot of time monitoring his Ingress portals. I wondered what it was like for AuntieEm. Did she share his passion for the game or was she just along for the ride? Mainly I had this admiration for the way in which he had turned a game that was sort of brutally competitive into the act of maintaining a peaceful realm.
Every True Story Ends In You Know
I looked forward to getting together with him in Carl’s when we were back from out trip to parts of the country where the portals were few and far between allowing for the creation of very long links, but it was not to be. Another Enlightened agent with a handle something like Mario65, who I sometimes battled, messaged me to let me know that Don had died in real life. AuntieEm dropped out of the game. I avoided attacking their portals as a sort of memorial. It is conceivable that one would last for a long time as long as other Enlightened agents charged it.
I tried to find his obituary from the limited information I had, thinking I might pay my respects to AuntieEm and maybe get her perspective on her partner’s obsession, but I did not have any luck. The lesson I drew from the encounter is that whatever game we play, we should make human connection one of the objects of the game.
I did a little hunting to find you an example of an extreme Ingress player illustrating the amount of energy and creativity than can go into it.