The multiplayer geolocation game Ingress was released by Google in 2012. Ingress is interesting for many reasons – as the first mainstream augmented reality game, as a precursor to the super-popular Pokemon GO, as an example of self-organizing active communities, as a platform for in-game art, and, to some extent, as an example of successful creation of the game world by the hands of players. We are talking about the ability to create portals, which has been available to players for several years. Portals are the main objects that players can interact with – capturing and holding them is the goal of the game. All of them are tied to some geographical coordinates and objects in the real world. Also learn more about the ingress store.
Because of these qualities, Ingress has become the subject of a large amount of interdisciplinary research .
Obviously, the authors of the game encourage the creation of portals on the site of various hyperlocal attractions, strange places that stand out for some reason. This is partly consistent with the plot and setting of Ingress – a game about secrets, conspiracies, battles hidden from prying eyes, which, if desired, can be attributed to the genre of urban fantasy. It has been repeatedly suggested that the game was designed by Google in order to collect geographic information about hard-to-reach and inconspicuous places.
As of July 2016, 15 million portals were offered by players, of which 5 million are included in the game. The number of players is currently estimated at 7 million people, that is, the specific activity of players in creating the game world turned out to be very high.
It should be noted that in 2015 the acceptance of new portals was discontinued. Around the same time, a movement began towards the commercialization of the game (ATM portals, in-game items with sponsor ads, in-game currency, a store), which coincided with the spin-off of game developer Niantic from Google into a separate company.
As a result of a game-experiment that lasted for several years, a map of the “invisible city” was created – a guide to graffiti lost in courtyards, memorial plaques, housing office art and other, in some places rather strange, objects. The number of portals in Moscow reaches 15,000. As noted in , Ingress can be viewed as a democratic form of exhibition curation in relation to street art.
However, at the moment, access to this data is difficult, since the official interface of the game does not allow you to export them for further analysis, or even search by portal names. It seems to be an interesting and useful task to obtain full and convenient access to the database of Ingress portals, both for studying the practices of the game, and due to the independent value of this data on urban space.
Luckily, the game’s developers didn’t make any extra effort to make it difficult to access the data. The easiest way to upload them is to use Ingress Intel, the official portal map on the Ingress website. Enthusiasts reverse-engineered the requests that the map page sends to the server, and created a python library that allows them to be automated. You can send a request with the boundaries on the map and get data about all the portals included in this area. Ingress stores very little out-of-game information about the portal – only the name, coordinates, and photo. An interesting task is their classification, as well as the analysis of their geographical properties, which, however, remains outside the scope of this study.
We have downloaded the portals in Moscow and mapped them to the Google Maps map. An interface has also been created that allows you to filter portals by name, as well as mark them as belonging to the street art category. The built-in tools of Google Maps perform clustering – the union of a large number of closely spaced portals, which simplifies the interaction with the map.
In this way, many hundreds of street art objects were found, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been marked on any other map. Many of the portals in Ingress have already lost their relevance and are associated with objects that have ceased to exist. Thus, these data can be considered as a platform not only for hyperlocal local history, but also for digital archeology.