For this assignment our object was to play and study games that relied upon new technologies. The case example we were assigned to study is Ingress, a mobile game that maps the geography of the planet into a virtual world. Using the GPS on our phone's, the game is able to map our location into the world and forces us to move in the physical world to make interactions in the virtual world. Before starting the game, I was assigned as the Rebels, fighting against the Enlightenment. It was cool how many of the portals in the world were based on public land marks, and they even included a photo of the said land mark. However the novelty wore off after awhile as I was just walking around building defenses and pylons. One of the main things is that not much is going on in the app, making it very un-engaging. I roamed around with my classmates a bit and they too found the whole experience a little hokey after awhile. I forgot about my card assignment so hopefully I remember to carry out that mission once I'm back on campus. In the end, it's definitely an avenue that shows promise, but the applications that take advantage of this need to have more engaging content within the app itself.
This game reminded me of the upcoming pokemon game which I thought was kind of disappointing in the trailer. Mainly due to the fact that the on screen content was just static images of pokemon where I wished we could be able to see into the virtual world through the phone itself, seeing 3D replications of pokemon using the phone as a magic mirror. However, that's just wishful thinking and rambling on my part. It'll be interesting to see how this type of genre grows once the Pokemon game is released and playable throughout the world.
