So I Started Playing Ingress

I make some strange decisions.

Lately I’ve been trying to re-evaluate some things in my life. What I want out of it. How to get my finances straightened out while handling my (currently) 68 hour workweek. Dealing with the ever present depression and hopelessness of it all.

An anime adaptation of a mobile game got me to try said mobile game again, and I’m not doing too horribly considering.

Probably could do better. Probably will. This is something I intend to do rather casually, possibly meeting people as I go on. In a perfect world, this would be a solid excuse to get out of the house.

I’ve admittedly only seen a couple of episodes of the show. It is surprisingly dry, suffering less from being an adaptation of a mobile game that takes a few liberties with its source material and more from its attempt to sell viewers of the show on the drama of the in-game events themselves. The game involves two separate factions working against each other to tag “portals” (real life places of interests that can be claimed within the game map) and take over territory yet together on certain world events; the anime by comparison uses those same mechanics to have an overarching storyline about a kid detective who can see the pasts of people by touching them and an amnesiac scientist looking to discredit the scientific institute she used to work for. As my mother would say, “it is definitely a thing.”

I genuinely did not think this game was still so popular. In fact, I did not think it was very popular at all in the United States. The trailer to the show claims over 25 million players, but Wikipedia claims the game has only been downloaded around 20 Million times… and that’s downloads, not active players. One unofficial source places the number of active players at approximately 800,000. Still, that’s more popular than I anticipated. A cursory look suggests that the regional scene I am near has a few dozen players, some of which being more active than others.

I’m far too busy to keep a lot of this up, but it’s an interesting diversion at least. Just need to make sure I’m not playing while driving. That won’t end well, for obvious reasons.