Since 2012, two rival factions have waged a quietly persistent war for control of the Mobile Bay area. Known as the Resistance (Blue) and the Enlightened (Green), they fight over neighborhoods, landmarks and public art — all inside the smartphone game Ingress.
What Is Ingress?
Ingress is a free augmented-reality game from Niantic Labs, a Google spinoff, available on iPhone and Android. It plays like a real-time version of the board game Risk, overlaying a map of portals onto actual structures: museums, churches, public art and government buildings across Mobile. Players join one of two teams — the Resistance (colloquially "Smurfs") or the Enlightened ("Toads") — and capture portals by placing virtual resonators or destroying the enemy’s.
Players are ranked level 1 to 16; higher levels deploy stronger resonators and "bursters" to attack enemy portals. Control is measured by portals, links and triangular "control fields," tallied on a regional level — South Alabama falls in region AM-03 Juliet-13 — and globally, in roughly weeklong rounds.
The Local Map
In Mobile, the Resistance largely controls Downtown (LoDa), Midtown and North Mobile, while the Enlightened hold the Eastern Shore and far West Mobile. LoDa, Langan Park and the University of South Alabama are hotly contested, changing hands weekly.
More Than a Game
Beyond competition, players say the game rewards exploring public spaces and public art they might otherwise never notice — there are hundreds of portals in the Mobile area, some genuinely underappreciated. Because portals must be visited in person, it nudges players into neighborhoods like Toulminville, Crichton, Satsuma, Coden, Fairhope, Foley and Stockton, and gets some of them walking or biking to portals in places like Daphne’s Village Point Park and Langan Park’s Art Trail.
A global-scale event known as an Anomaly was scheduled for New Orleans the following Saturday. Players of all ages join local meetups and inter-faction events — and, as the author noted, no, Google is not paying them to say so.