Getting out of the house and meeting new people is hard.

What Is Ingress?

Heres the breakdown:

This world around you is not what it seems.

Our future is at stake, and you must choose a side.

A mysterious energy has been unearthed by a team of scientists in Europe.

We must control it or it will control us.

The Enlightened seek to embrace the power that this energy may bestow upon us.

The Resistance struggle to defend, and protect whats left of our humanity.

If you are though, it spans several books and comics, and hastons of video background.

I should mention here that Ingress is by no means new.

Inthis article at Vice, Niantic noted that there are over seven million players around the globe.

Our own Eric Ravenscraftwrote a review of the game at Android Policea few years ago.

Lifehacker alum Kevin Purdy loves the game, andwrote a great getting started guide here.

Niantic has even teased a follow-up game.

to play, you have to be physically present at portal locations in the real world.

Plus, in the game, you have a limited range of action.

You get in-game badges by hacking or capturing portals youve never visited before.

Some missions are easy to do, while others require some real strategy before you dive in them.

The exercise is good too, especially if youre normally sedentary.

When you sign up, you may even get messages from players offering to help you level.

As soon as I started playing, a friendly player reached out with an intro to the local community.

I even got messages from a nearby enemy player encouraging me to switch teams and join his side.

), or because someone was in the area and we decided to say hello to one another.

Ive stumbled into enemy players fighting over the same portals I am.

For more, check out theIngress Google+ page.

It has over 3 million followers and theIngress Google+ communityhas close to 200,000.

But the really close communities are the location-specific ones.

Live events draw in hundredsif not thousandsof your fellow players from all over the globe to play together.

They only happen every quarter or so, but they involve thousands of players.

and get involved in the game on a level you hadnt before.

That means it comes with all the things that multiplayer games have.

There are plenty of jerks, but theyre an extreme minority.

You have to keep a certain separation from the game.

The game encourages that separation, too.

you’re free to even get intoslap-fight duels with enemy players.

It can be tough, but its all ephemeral.

You have to let it go and develop a kind of Zen mindset towards it all.

This wasextremelyhard for me at first.

but Ive coined a saying that my local friends like to repeat: Trash talk doesnt get you AP.

Stick to the positive aspects of the game, ignore the bad actors, and have fun.

Remember to use Ingress to get out and get exercise, but look up at the places you see.

Use it to get together with people, but talk to those people when you do.

Ive met people for whom Ingress is their primary source of interaction with others.

Ive met people who have lost weight thanks to all of the walking they do while playing Ingress.

If you stick with it, Ill bet you will too.