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drwexSome of you know I play Ingress (I'm drwex there, too - Resistance, though I do have more than a few RL friends who play green). This past summer Pygment finally picked up the game and it became a great way to motivate us to get out together more and do things.
Ingress is, in part, a game of making triangles. You connect up points and form a triangle, called a field. You score two kinds of points for this - a personal score that is fixed and a team score based on the size of the field. In-game achievements (badges) are given based on total team score acquired. Saturday night we made a field, which looked something like this:
In case the image isn't clear, that's going from the Cape to Holliston and up to Maine. The field had 16 layers, each scoring points for the person who made it. We got 3 people Onyx badges (the highest level in game) and 3 people got Platinum (the next-to-highest). A lot of people were involved in planning and carrying this out. I might have had something to do with organizing and motivating it, but lots of other people did heavy lifting.
I've said before that Ingress isn't very good as a game. Its quality comes entirely from the people who play it. Early in the planning stages of this thing an in-game friend contacted me to tell me that one of their friends had just been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Would it be OK if this guy came in and took the points for making some of the field layers?
Uh, hell yes. I don't know this guy, but I know cancer sucks and it's serious. Getting an Onyx badge is something that would take a long time and given his diagnosis he might never make it. But with the donations from Saturday he went from zero to the top in one night. He got to see his name on the leaderboards, too. Big credit to Pygment, who delayed getting her Onyx so this guy could go.
We can't improve his condition, nor change what is to come. But for one night we did a thing to buoy the spirits of someone who isn't likely to get a whole lot of good news anytime soon.
Ingress is, in part, a game of making triangles. You connect up points and form a triangle, called a field. You score two kinds of points for this - a personal score that is fixed and a team score based on the size of the field. In-game achievements (badges) are given based on total team score acquired. Saturday night we made a field, which looked something like this:
In case the image isn't clear, that's going from the Cape to Holliston and up to Maine. The field had 16 layers, each scoring points for the person who made it. We got 3 people Onyx badges (the highest level in game) and 3 people got Platinum (the next-to-highest). A lot of people were involved in planning and carrying this out. I might have had something to do with organizing and motivating it, but lots of other people did heavy lifting.
I've said before that Ingress isn't very good as a game. Its quality comes entirely from the people who play it. Early in the planning stages of this thing an in-game friend contacted me to tell me that one of their friends had just been diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. Would it be OK if this guy came in and took the points for making some of the field layers?
Uh, hell yes. I don't know this guy, but I know cancer sucks and it's serious. Getting an Onyx badge is something that would take a long time and given his diagnosis he might never make it. But with the donations from Saturday he went from zero to the top in one night. He got to see his name on the leaderboards, too. Big credit to Pygment, who delayed getting her Onyx so this guy could go.
We can't improve his condition, nor change what is to come. But for one night we did a thing to buoy the spirits of someone who isn't likely to get a whole lot of good news anytime soon.
