You had me and you lost me: Ingress

In the past I've had a lot of fun playing Ingress. The game has horrible design problems, but it is nonetheless the premiere alternate reality geogame due to its massive worldwide scope. It was fun to drive and walk around wherever I was and visit portals (and kill them, don't get me started), and for a while it was fun to hang out with the Ingress folks and meet new people. Then stuff started to happen… Aside from some social drama in our local Ingress group in the faction I play (because it's important to divide players in half and make them fight, don't get me started), the main deterrent to my play was that the game became a boring grind pretty early. There just really isn't all that much to do that's interesting other than visit places, and that's kinda time-consuming. It didn't help that the portals are often placed in broken ways, and that the game is not maintained well either centrally or by crowdsourcing. The rules are kind of stupid and arbitrary.

Still, that didn't stop me from playing regularly to maximum level, and after that occasionally going and doing stuff. Most recently, I've been hitting the Ingress portals along my regular walking route, and proposing a few new ones. In some months, I will hear which ones have been accepted (B).

The latest Ingress feature is a little memorization+twitch game that you play to make portal rewards better. As far as I can tell from the sketchy online descriptions, you will be forced to play this game once in a while to receive portal rewards. I've tried it: it's terrible. It's completely antithetical to everything the rest of the game is about, and is not a style of game I like to play. It makes no sense whatsoever in the game's over-elaborate storyline. In short, I detest it.

I can't imagine getting out my Ingress scanner anymore. I've maybe put a couple hundred hours into this game. I'm done, at least for now and probably forever. In the famous formulation of Eric Burns, you had me and you lost me. (B)