Tag: Ingress

“Hacking” as a Multipurpose Term in Ingress

by Kaitlin O’Brien Based on yesterday’s lecture on platform histories that had students code bend Super Mario Bros. on the original console, I have been thinking about how similar strategies could be applied to the augmented reality game Ingress. Through my experience with code bending, I began to think about what I am more familiar with and what I view as similar to code bending and that is hacking. In many ways, Ingress is a display of “urban hacking, and the reappropriation of public space away from an indexical, purely informational, and cognitivist use of mobile computing, and toward the affective and often normatively disruptive acts of distributed storytelling” (Coleman 283). Before I can even begin to explore hacking in Ingress,...

Ingress as a Media Archaeology Artifact

by Kaitlin O’Brien After my initial decision to pursue death imagery in older games, I have decided to shift in a different direction and to instead focus my blogs on the augmented reality game (ARG), Ingress. Yesterday’s discussion left me with a lot to think about, and I realized that in many ways, components of Ingress are rooted heavily in media archaeology. Over the next week, I aim to delve into Ingress and explore its manifestations of socio-cultural imagery within the game. Ingress is a mobile game rich, with a narrative that heavily supports its gameplay mechanics. How does embodiment relate to Ingress? Game players, known in this game as agents, are applying their physical bodies to this augmented reality...