Storming Fort Warren
A group of Boston augmented reality game players build friendships, communities, and mind control fields
By Jamie Bologna
1. Battlefield
George’s Island is a little over 7 miles from Boston’s waterfront. Depending on the tides, George’s is made up of 50 or so acres of land. Standing on its banks, you can see the Boston skyline, as well as many of Boston’s harbor islands — the Deer Island sewer treatment plant, the now-closed Long Island, and the wooden homes of Hull.
Most of George’s is covered by a star-shaped Civil War-era Fort Warren. There’s a dock, a visitor’s center, picnic tables, and grove of apple trees. Earlier this month, before the blustery winds and cold of New England winter officially settled in, the National Parks Service hosted the last visit until spring. On a harbor ferry from Long Wharf, eight committed Ingress players left the mainland to make Fort Warren their battlefield, in a quest to control George’s Island.
2. The Game
Any discussion about Ingress — Google’s augmented reality game—has to first include a few explainers. For starters, what the heck is it?
At its most basic, Ingress is a map app, overlaid with points of interest, historic and significant landmarks. Those landmarks—called portals—serve as the central mission of the game. Visit them in real life, hack them with your phones, and take them over for one of two factions, the Resistance (Blue) or the Enlightened (Green).
There’s more, of course. Connect—link—three portals together to create a triangle called a control field. The larger the area of a control field, the more access points—AP—you earn. You use AP to reach new levels (1–16) and the ability to use more powerful gear. Simple enough.
I could go deeper into the backstory—and it’s a deep one—but it’s probably enough to understand the basics. Within the game, the portals on the map exude an invisible force called “XM,” exotic matter, which some sort of alien force (the Shapers) placed here on earth. Sort of like Scientology, except it’s a video game that people play with religious fervor.
Players for the Resistance are skeptical of XM and want to fight its power; the Enlightened want to harness it to further evolve humanity or something. I joined the Resistance faction at the end of last year. I’m always skeptical.
I found the game by chance, when it was in the Google app store. I convinced my significant other, generally an avid gamer, to join me and we wandered around Cambridge and Boston together, staring at our phones and trying to capture portals.
Then the questions piled up. What’s the point of the game, anyway? How can we win? And most importantly, who are all these people who seem to be playing around us but we’ve never actually seen in the flesh?
My curiosity grew; my partner’s waned and eventually I was the only one still playing. It’s not the kind of thing that’s entirely fun to do alone.
Enter the Eastern Massachusetts Resistance.
3. “The Clawed Lord” and “Davis Dame”
James Pinkerton is Harvard Law’s Manager of Technology Support Services. He’s worked at the law school for four years and has been working in technology since the late nineties. He wears ties to work and takes the T to Cambridge every day from the suburbs. In his late 40s, he has a wife and two grown kids. Outside of the office, he likes to hike, walk, and design board games in his spare time.
In real life, he’s accomplished and plenty nice. On Ingress, he’s a bit of a legend, known as “The Clawed Lord.”
The username, he said, stems from his board games, a character that he created whose many powers include deception. That might be true, but he seemed pretty forthcoming over an iced coffee at Starbucks.
A few years ago, Pinkerton started walking on his lunch break to escape the health perils of an office job and an office lifestyle. He tracked his steps with a Fitbit, but at some 12,000 steps a day, he said that it wasn’t enough.
“Honestly it just got boring,” he said. “And when winter came, it was cold.”
His friend Mike introduced him to Ingress in January 2013, before it was widely available to everyone. He played a bit, finding his way through Cambridge and his hometown of Malden. And as the New England winter eventually gave way to spring, on he walked.
“The motivating factor was walking. It’s cold out, why walk? But to get Green portals and smash them? That was enough to get me out,” he said. Today he averages some 20,000 steps daily.
And it was also about discovery. “For example, I’d walk and find something, look up and see Amelia Earhart’s house. I had no idea that was in Medford.”
Apart from his friend Mike, Pinkerton didn’t know any other players at first. He’d run into them from time to time, feeling like he was being watched from all angles. Some would say hello. Others would ask him why he was destroying their portals and links. Nearly all of them were on the Green team.
Eventually his friend Mike invited him to join the Eastern Massachusetts Resistance group, an online/offline private community of Blue players. Private in that you need to get an invite to join. And to be a certified player for the Blues, you have meet up with a current member. Once in, members can take part in local meet ups to claim portals, create fields, and farm for gear.
“Ingress has been great for diversity in my life,” said Pinkerton. “I’ve met people who have different politics than me, from different walks of life and ages. And because people are people, they end up on your real life friends lists.”
With his Ingress friends, Pinkerton said he’s travelled all over Massachusetts, the other New England states, and even to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
While it’s mostly fun and he’s made many real-life connections, he noted that for some of the female players, it’s not all fun and games.
“I’ve had friends who have been stalked,” he said. “Some women have had people figure out where they live. There’s a complaints process for stalkers, but like in all human affairs, there are opportunities to be an ass.”
Ruth Alfasso has experienced people acting like asses. She’s in her 40s, married, and spends much of her free time on Ingress in the Davis Square area of Somerville. She works for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Her username is “DavisDame,” followed by a series of numbers, something that she said helps protect her anonymity (there are a number of other Davis Dames in town, and since the Ingress app cuts off long usernames with an ellipsis, she said the random numbers make all of them blend together to potential stalkers).
When one of her friends from Florida introduced Alfasso to the game, she told her to truly experience the game, Alfasso had to meet up with other players. So eventually she set up a meeting — a few years ago at 9:00 on a July evening at Powerhouse Park in Somerville.
“I’m out there, by myself, standing there in a yellow dress,” she recalls. “It just so happened that a friend of mine walked by and asked what I was doing here in the park.” She was there to meet a guy, at night, to play a game. Obviously.
“I said to him, ‘you may very well be the last person I ever see,’” she said, laughing and clearly still alive. “So far nothing really terrible has happened to me.”
Although Ingress players skew overwhelmingly male, Alfasso said in her experience it’s about 30 percent female players. She said some other women who have been stalked while playing, and that for her security is a real concern.
“One guy would leave Ingress gear in my driveway, just to let me know he knew where I lived,” she said. “It’s fine, but there’s a lot of opportunities to freak people out and troll them.”
She got her start playing in a similar way to Pinkerton — slowly at first, alone, then meeting some folks, and now she takes her husband along. Alfasso is more than an active player today, it’s her life.
“I’ve given up TV, and reading for the most part,” she said. “I still have friends, but they’re mostly from Ingress now.”
Since her start, she has travelled to Montreal, Vermont, Florida, and Seattle to play. And she’s an organizing member of the Eastern Massachusetts Resistance.
“A lot of people stop playing in the winter. We started losing and so I started organizing events and meetups.”
In the 18 months since she started playing and organizing, Alfasso has logged hundreds of hours of play and has dropped some 30 pounds.
4. Taking The Island
Pinkerton connected me on Google+ with Alfasso and I asked to tag along on one of the Eastern Massachusetts Resistance’s big missions of the season — taking back George’s Island from the Greens.
I boarded the Ferry for George’s at Long Wharf and immediately started looking over my shoulder. Are there any Greens here? Who are these people on the boat that I’m about to meet for the first time?
Alfasso and her three friends saw me right away — I had noob written all over my face. They were gathered around a table staring at their Android and iPhones, talking strategy, and munching on snacks. They had hats, gloves, and back-up battery chargers for the four hours we’d spend on the island.
They all eagerly told me about their plan — take the island and hold it for the winter. Once the last ferry leaves, the island is yours until spring. And they told me about last year, which ended up being a bloodbath for the Blue team. It was 3 Blue against 12 Green—they were outnumbered and they lost. A week later 22 Blue players rented a private boat and attempted to come back to the island for a covert op take over. The state police stopped them from landing.
As we talked, a guy my age — somewhere in his 20s—wearing a big puffy green coat approached the table. Alfasso was skeptical. He said he was with Blue, but she demanded to see his phone. Even after confirming that he played for Blue, she still wasn’t convinced.
“He’s from Providence but I’ve never heard of him,” she said to us, after he went back to his table. “I don’t trust him.”
He left us with a map. And a new plan.
Let the Greens keep a few portals on the island, as an effort to discourage them from trekking out there in the middle of the winter. If there were any Green players on the island when the ferry disembarked, all bets were off—crush them all, crush them hard.
On the island, they started attacking slowly, trying to draw out any Green players. After a half hour it was clear to Alfasso that there were none out there, George’s was theirs for the taking. I may have smashed a few Green portals myself along the way.
As the afternoon waged on, and the group turned the island Blue, Alfasso still refused to believe we were alone on George’s. She and her husband feared a last-second blitz by some very patient Green players, leaving the Blue team mere minutes to reclaim them before the ferry left.
Clever, but the surprise attack never happened. Ingress is a game built on strategy, group play, and sometimes mindgames, it seems even the mind starts to play tricks.
When we marched back on the boat to head back to Long Wharf, it was over. Blue had taken the island. Our phones were drained, our fingers and noses cold. Alfasso munched on some Cherrios from a Ziplock. Her husband bought a bowl of chili from the booth on the boat.
The conversation quickly turned to the next task—holding the island for the winter. Alfasso updated us on some of the upcoming events, while charging her phone and surveying the gains they made.
5. Endgame
Both Alfasso and James Pinkerton told me that there isn’t really a way to win at Ingress. It’s more about the chase and the thrill of discovering new places. It’s about the people.
“The higher level you reach, the more you realize it’s not about winning,” said Pinkerton. “It’s like basketball—you don’t have the ball all the time, to bounces back and forth.” Sometimes the Greens are up, sometimes the Blues.
But a basketball game ends, eventually.
And Alfasso seems to think it’ll end too. Indeed Google’s Niantic Labs, notoriously quiet on their plans, does have plans for a second augmented reality game called “Endgame.”
“One day you’ll wake up and it’s all gone,” said Alfasso. “I’m kind of looking forward to the day that it’s over.”
She’ll have her life back. Or maybe her life will be better for having played it.
