While I go days at a time without turning on the client, I do still go out on an Ingress level-8 op every week or two; and now I have a couple of purely-social reasons to pitch in now and then.
Previously in this series: Ingress, Things About Ingress, Ingress, Month 3, Ingress Weekly, Ingress Tourism, Advanced Ingress, Ingress Chase Scene, and Ingress Ebb and Flow.
The first is that my wife started playing. After watching me grind away between November and April, she suddenly asked for an account and quietly worked her way to Level 8 in less than four months; it helps that the portal density near our house is extreme, and also she travels to other big cities.
So that gives us another topic of dinner-table conversation, and a distraction on the boring parts of walks around town.
But here’s the odd one. We have an old “Arts & Crafts” style wooden house, and some of the rafters and other roof apparatus were getting beat up and rotten. So we hired a carpenter to fix it up, and he organized scaffolding all around the house. And even though it wasn’t due a paint job for another couple of years, the scaffolding was an opportunity, so the carpenter referred us to a good housepainter, and beautification was proceeding. Then the painter went to the doctor for a belly-ache and found himself being rushed in for emergency colon-cancer surgery.
We needed another house-painter, urgently, before the scaffolding came down. I asked my friends, I asked on Twitter, I asked everywhere, and had no luck. Then I realized that my friends and followers are various kinds of nerds and geeks who don’t hang with trades-people. So I turned around and asked the Vancouver Resistance community and, hey-presto, two painters in the first 48 hours, and we hired one, and the job is nearly finished.
The game has enriched my life. I wonder when it’ll be over?
