Play environmentĪ player using the mobile app is presented with a map representing the surrounding area. Niantic Labs not only supports these activities, it often arranges them.
In real life, the factions occasionally ignore the back-story and co-operate for the sake of real-life gameplay and game balance: for example, by establishing neutral zones and rules of engagement for training new players for socializing and occasionally for serious real-life purposes such as honoring fallen heroes.
Similarly, the Enlightened in general are referred to as "Frogs" or "Toads", lower-level Enlightened players as "Tadpoles". In some areas, the Resistance are colloquially referred to as "Smurfs" and lower-level Resistance players as "Smurflings". Both teams have naturally tended to balance each other out in population. The Resistance is represented in the game by the color blue, and the Enlightened by green. These two factions are the opposing "sides" or "teams" in the game. Within the game, human reactions to this discovery fall into two opposing factions: the Enlightened fight believing their actions will uplift humanity and bring about the next chapter in human evolution, whereas the Resistance believes that it is protecting humanity from Shaper ingression and preserving humanity's freedom. This substance has been associated with the Shapers, a mysterious phenomenon or alien race.
The game makers' framing device for the game is as follows: Alongside the discovery of the Higgs Boson by the physicists at CERN in 2012, it has also been discovered that the Earth has been seeded with "Exotic Matter," or XM. The only scored competition is between the factions. Players of opposing factions can "battle" indirectly in approximate real time for control of portals, with one faction attacking a portal to destroy its resources and defences and the other faction restoring them as they are damaged, but there is no personal penalty for "losing" a portal, the destruction of a field the player created, or any other reason. Progress in the game is measured on an individual level primarily by accumulating "Action Points" (or AP), and AP are awarded for a variety of in-game actions: destroying or damaging an enemy portal, capturing, linking, or recharging a portal, creating a control field, and other actions. The gameplay consists of capturing "portals" at places of cultural significance, such as public art, landmarks, monuments, etc., and linking them to create virtual triangular "control fields" over geographical areas. Unlike many other MMOGs, the competition in Ingress is primarily between the two opposing factions rather than between individual players, and players never interact directly in the game or suffer any kind of damage other than temporarily running out of "XM", the power that fuels all actions except movement and communication. Ingress is also considered to be a location-based exergame. The game has a science fiction back story with a continuous open narrative.
The game was first released for Android devices on November 15, 2012, and later for iOS on July 14, 2014. Ingress is a location-based, augmented-reality mobile game developed by Niantic, a company spun off from Google.