Today I went on a run, guided by my quest for easily won portals. I succeeded, but probably spent a good deal of my run looking mildly insane. At one point, while I was busily linking two portals by repeatedly pacing back and forth between them while staring at my phone, I heard someone say, “Yo, what is that chick doing??”

Playing Ingress. It’s a location based game from Niantic Labs, Google’s gaming company that poses the fiction that beneath the world we know lies another, one littered with portals, each one controlled by one of two factions: the enlightened or the resistance. Without going into too much detail players pick a side and they begin to battle for portals, each one of which is always overlaid on top of a piece of artwork. It’s a fascinating premise and the game’s fans are legion (don’t believe me? Download Ingress and check out how many portals are all around you. Try and hack one or destroy it and you might find out your friendly neighbor is playing for the other side).