it's a fuzzy fuzzy world…

How I spent my day yesterday… 

Originally shared by Maggie Coyne

On September 6th, 2015, about a dozen resistance and enlightened agents gathered on Indianapolis’s Monument Circle to create some cross faction field art, putting up a green and blue semicolon to show some #TaterBugLove  and to support awareness of an issue that has affected many of us personally. A few days later, Joe Philley unexpectedly died. In the hangout for Indy’s Operation Semicolon contribution, as in nearly every ingress hangout and g+ community that day, agents began sharing stories about meeting Joe and discussing ways to honor his legacy. One of the most cherished memories of Joe for all of us was Mission Day: Gen Con and for the Resistance in particular, the op he helped us with that weekend. I’m not sure what we were thinking, scheduling an operation right after three days spent hiking around downtown all day and staying up partying all night! Somehow we pulled it off despite our hangovers, and with Joe’s help some of our most dedicated field agents received platinum and onyx illuminator badges. Mission Day weekend was one of the most positive and integrated cross faction events to ever happen in Indy. Cross faction relations have long been strained, at best, in Indiana, but a new cross faction social group arose over the summer, lead by Geoff Estes, Katherine Getts, Joe Getts, Kelly Shaw and Kelsie Wessel, and began the hard work of reaching across the faction divide and organizing fun social events and cross faction field art projects that would be open and welcoming to all players. Their efforts were the spark that made this project possible.

Hoping to capitalize on the momentum of the new cross faction group and the positive experiences of Mission Day and Operation Semicolon, we decided to aim big with a memorial operation for Uncle Joe and try to recreate the op that he helped execute, the last op he ever did, with green and blue links. Initially we were going to try to teal field, but then my enlightened counterpart in planning this op, Ron Groves, had the brilliant idea of leaving the inside unfielded, to just draw out the shape of the original op with clusters of blue and green links. The emptiness in the middle would symbolize the void left in the global ingress community by Joe’s passing. Thus Operation Void was born from the Operation Semicolon hangout, which we recycled and renamed (because who doesn’t have enough hangouts already). Then we started reaching out and adding agents from across the state and neighboring states to help with the project. On October 3rd, after three weeks of whirlwind planning and preparation, agents of both factions from across the state headed out on a cold, rainy Saturday to clear lanes and throw up their links.

Death and tragedy loomed large throughout this op, but the sadness of it all was tempered by the amazing way the Ingress community rallies to support each other in the hard times. Two of the agents who helped with key farming and transfers are themselves dealing with parents facing terminal illness. While they were not available to help on the day of the op, they still took time out of their busy lives to contribute to the cause in whatever ways they could. A few days before the op, my enlightened clearing buddy lost his grandfather and had to drop out of the project to attend the funeral on the day of the operation. And, the tragic loss of @wilsburg961 and many others in the massacre in Oregon just two days before definitely weighed heavily on everyone’s hearts as they headed out to clear. Yet one cannot help but be inspired and uplifted by the outpouring of love that happens, and the way that faction boundaries dissolve, whenever tragedy strikes an agent. Agents from both factions contributed money to send flowers to the funeral of the enlightened agent here who lost his grandfather and any additional money collected, along with countless other donations, went to the memorial fund for @wilsburg961. This game connects so many diverse people and the community those people have built takes care of its own on a global scale that is truly unique. It’s incredible, it’s indescribable, and it’s #whyiingress . Thank you @delta102 for the legacy of friendship you have left us through this game.

And, thanks the following agents who helped with this op, either actively or in a supporting role:

@norsevorg @NihilistProxy @StinkieHippie @HoorayJen @SinisterKitt3n @AirplaneGuy737 @Antebi @sumo911 @MonkeyLuv @Sofakat @Eshal @qweyiio @myrrlyn @LaFamiglia @LaFamigliaQueen @Mystickittie @Ecthaelion @drahn @Forte @Catastrophi @ThaZimbo @MemorableFancy @Geta2J @rasetrack @TeeJae @Gemminie @everseeker @MFalcon @InJerk @TollerMom @KiltedWarrior76 @EpicGeek @JZ78 @bassmaster1963 @cntrlwiz @Dantuma @DWhip25 @R1verS0ng @meggleiscious @WinterrRose @GenBelisarius @RebellionBlue @dcstang @hoss704 @shaeleej @sPaZZeR @Fatticus @smurfbuster @philliie @RealLifePixel @itswhateveritis @Barnac1es @SimoneRivera @SEALTeamSeven @flexyournoggin @Firefly27 @unathi @dayvidlee 

#RIPJoe ,

@bigmaggie

#missionday   #ingressfs   #crossfaction   #niantic    #ingress  

Anne Beuttenmüller Matilde Tusberti Ethan Lepouttre  Ingress  John Hanke  John Zuur Platten  Linda Besh 

On the nature of friendship…

So there’s this game that I play on my phone… it’s kind of a cross between geocaching and capture the flag, with two global teams and a big in-person social component. (Hang in there, non-Ingressers… I see you rolling your eyes and I promise this post isn’t really about Ingress.)

Over the months that I’ve been playing, one of the best things about Ingress has been the people I’ve met and the new friends that I’ve made. I didn’t really expect my teammates to turn into anything more than passing acquaintances… people to have a beer with or go on missions with, but not “real” friends, for lack of a better term. I didn’t expect to find people that I could talk to about absolutely anything… people who’d become part of my day-to-day life in more than just playing the game.

I mean, part of being an adult is realizing that elementary-school-style BFFs don’t really last forever, and a lot of “friends” will be made around common interests, and when that common ground goes away, the friends just drift away too… Sometimes it happens immediately, and sometimes over a longer period of time, but it happens and you get used to it. And usually, those relationships are replaced by others as you find new places to go or things to be involved in (or change workplaces or churches or whatever else formed that common ground). I didn’t expect this to be any different, right?

But then one day you realize that those interest-based friendships have transcended their point of origin, and it makes you start to think about the nature of friendship. I have friends that I met through the PetsForums on CompuServe, years ago, who are still real in-person friends today, even though CompuServe has gone the way of the dodo, and even though some of us haven’t seen each other more than a handful of times in the intervening years. I have some Toller friends who I’ve not ever even met in person, and yet they’re a real and valued part of my life. And I have met so many incredible people through the band and all the sci-fi cons that we’ve attended and played at. And then there’s the fire department… suffice it to say that people really mean it when they talk about the fire department being a family.

And now there’s Ingress, and suddenly I find myself with a whole new puddle of friends and acquaintances where our initial common ground was just this game that we play on our phones. But then some of us found we have more in common… and time together, whether in person or online, became increasingly more about the social interaction and less about the game… and suddenly I realized that I was pretty heavily invested in some of these friendships. Some of these people had become or were on the way to becoming real friends… not “just” Ingress friends. And that’s a good thing… right?

But something seems different about the Ingress (or maybe gaming in general?) dynamic and the other venues where I’ve made friends. Something about these friendships seems more fragile… more tenuous… possibly more transitory. Or maybe it’s just because they started so fast and it’s still been a (relatively) short period of time (I just started playing in January and started meeting people in the spring). So I started wondering… will these friendships outlive our shared interest in the game? Am I investing too heavily in friendships that could go away tomorrow? But life is boring if you don’t take risks, so I made friends… and I let myself get attached… and I convinced myself that some of them weren’t just “Ingress Friends.” And then someone (who I’d spent time with but who wasn’t one of my closer Ingress friends) quit the game. Just disappeared for a couple of weeks, then resurfaced to announce that he was quitting, and then disappeared again from the usual online locations. And that’s perfectly okay, because sometimes RealLife really needs our attention and the best way to do that is to drop the game. And I get that the easiest way to extract yourself from something (especially something as all-consuming as Ingress can be) is just to make a complete break, at least in the short term. But it shook me. If he could just disappear, could the same thing happen with some of the people I’d gotten closer to?

And I realized that I really don’t want that to happen. And that the first step to making sure that doesn’t happen is probably to have conversations that start with something along the lines of “Hey… I want you to know that even if one of us leaves the game, I hope we can still be friends. Because I don’t want to lose you.”

Or heck, maybe I’ll just send this post. 

#ingress   #friendship   #justagame   #notjustagame  

Frustration is being one link away from finishing a nice little set of fields and being at burnout on both ends of the link. #forlackofakey #ingress #playinginthepark