Ingress for Tournament - or Olympia?
WildcardCR
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Hello everyone!
I'm reading an article right now that the International Olympic Committee is looking into e-sports. An idea that seems difficult to implement - of all things because of Olympic statutes. While League of Legends or Fortnite are booming, filling stadiums and attracting millions of viewers, the Olympic Sports Weeks in Singapore (June 23-25) are set to feature only Olympic sports in digital form. Virtual tennis or archery with Tic Tac Bow. All not a figurehead for e-sports. Violent games are taboo anyway. Whether it's chess, cycling, taekwondo or baseball, they all have in common that the players sit behind screens and hardly move. For me there is no Olympic feeling.
With the still fresh impressions of the Athens anomaly, the idea came to me: Couldn't Ingress be made Olympic? Ingress has a perfect connection between the sporting aspect and the digital game! I walked all over the weekend, took 30K steps over anomaly day, even 40K on Missionday. With a city as a playing field. I still feel that today.
What could Ingress look like at the Olympics? I imagined: A playing field, at least 200 x 200 meters in size, totally flat. 2 teams, each 8 people, with fresh accounts level 1. The level requirements are a bit lower, so that you could be at level 8 after 20-30 minutes. Each levelup gives rare, predetermined items. Niantic will crate a fixed number of portals on the field, maybe different for each match, but always symmetrically distributed. With disciplines for points you would have to think about something, shards should be there 😊
What we know as Intel would be an overlay for the viewer to what's going on the pitch. Here he sees people walking around shouting to each other and, most importantly, why they are doing it. He sees points counting as shards move. Players farming keys or blocking foreign links with a spurt. It should be spectacular somehow. Unlike the anomalies, where without this information, our actions just seem strange to the uninvolved people.
What is in demand at the Olympics, in addition to sportiness, are issues such as accessibility and gender equality. This has been the case since the beginning of Ingress. Olympia does not want any depiction of violence. We don't burst on people, we burst on virtual objects. It's like skeet **** in the real world to me. In karate and judo, blood sometimes flows.
At the Olympics, the stipulation still applies that there should be no technical access restrictions. Will there be tournament cell phones here, the same model for all players? I think it could be solved.
Please write your thoughts on this. Maybe Niantic can give us something to try out: Simply tinker a tournament mode for switching to level 1 with the existing account, and later back to normal mode.
I am sure that there will be enough players to create and try out rules and modes, playing on existing portals. Maybe in the future a finished concept will come out that can be shown.
Even if it's not enough for the Olympics: Wouldn't it be fantastic to try something like this as a side event at one of the next events?
#ingressfortournament
Comments
Isn't that pretty much exactly what Niantic did for their two Agent Olympiad events in Japan? Each Agent got an "event account" which had the same stats (and items?) for everyone and the two teams had to run around in a rented amusement park to complete challenges, capture portals and capture shards.
It was streamed live here, but requires a membership to Niconico to watch after all these years: