Augmented regionalism: Ingress as geomediated gaming narrative

Abstract

As new mobile and gaming technologies become increasingly ubiquitous, they encourage new modes of storytelling and engagement. This article focuses on the Google game Ingress, which combines augmented reality with geomedia to create a robust and complex digital narrative. More importantly, Ingress combines globalism with regionalism in a way that rewrites the regional as global, and vice versa. In turn, the transformative nature of the smaller real-world regionalist narratives help to lend ethos to the overarching globalist (fictional) narrative within the game world. Through narrative analysis of this transmedia game world and community, this article considers ways that information and communications technologies are able to use storytelling to negotiate complex relationships between the regional and the global.

Keywords:

• Ingress
• gaming
• geographical information systems
• regionalism
• augmented reality
• media studies

Notes on contributor

Shira Chess is an Assistant Professor of Mass Media Arts at the University of Georgia in the Department of Telecommunications. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Currently, Niantic Labs appears to be both an offshoot company of Google, running the game space, and also a corporation, which exists in the game world. Because of this the company running the game is simultaneously part of the game space, making the game an Alternate Reality Game.

2. At the time of writing, Ingress is still in closed beta (players can play by invitation only, although invitations are not difficult to get). While the game itself is still in transition, the transformative nature of game play makes the game worth studying as it emerges.