[aharrison]

Slightly off-topic: I managed to snag an invite and play around with ingress a bit and I have to say, as a game, it is pretty terrible. You have to find portals, get within a few dozen meters, and then interact with them on a cool down. If there are no portals in your area, there is literally nothing to do in it.

It looks like it was designed as an excuse for people to walk around with their GPS enabled and take pictures of "interesting" places. Which is too bad because the concept is kind of cool, but without any actual playability outside of these key locations...what's to keep me playing?

[27182818284]

I was pretty disappointed at first too, because I couldn't find any portals. Then one day I discovered a spot with 3. Then I found out that if you log on with your web browser you can see the whole range of portals with a Google Maps-like interface. I won't say I'm hooked, but it is played every couple of days. There are not a lot of portals where I am either, but new portals are added periodically and you can submit places to become portals. The latter part is probably the whole reason Google launched it: Google created an army of people taking photos of landmarks and interesting businesses, museums, etc.

[lallysingh]

It really depends on where you are. In NYC it's actually pretty hot.

[aharrison]

But that is the problem. There should be SOMETHING to do even when you aren't in a hotspot. In my town there are only 3 portals, and only (apparently) one person in the opposing faction. Why would I bother playing?

[arkem]

You could take photos and submit them as potential portal locations (you can share the photos with ingress from the android camera/gallery). That could encourage more people to play and give the current players more to do.

The downside is that I think it takes a few weeks for portal suggestions to be processed.