Discussion is being had online about a couple of things related to Ingress and Pokémon While Black. One is the police interactions, which I can’t say much about. But I do have thoughts on access to the game in general, which I’d like to share.
About Ingress And Pokémon Go
Ingress was created in late 2013 by Niantic Labs, a small section of the information behemoth we know as Google. Its premise: two factions, Enlightened and Resistance, vie for control of portals through which exotic matter leaks in from another dimension. Enlightened want to harness it, Resistance want to stop it. Along with this is a silly plotline where bad actors create fake news reports and stuff that is delivered via media files in game. (We grumble and throw them away. 95% of players ignore the plot.)
In order to advance the game along, Niantic first introduced a small group of portals based on public available data and GPS coordinates. These portals were all libraries, fire departments, and post offices. (Fire departments would be deleted over time for obvious safety reasons.) The GPS coordinates were awful and we had to constantly submit move requests so a portal for one town’s fire department wouldn’t be five miles away and across a river. Key to the game’s success was the ability for users to submit their own portal requests, thus creating more and more portals to interact with.
Over the next two years, Ingress players around the world submitted new portals. In the beginning, players capped out at level 8, based on earning experience while playing. Eventually, the cap was raised to 16, and badges were introduced — in order to advance, people needed both experience and badges. One of those was a badge for successful portal submissions.
Pokémon Go (PG, to spare me the accent) was created entirely off the data in the Ingress portal database. (You’re welcome.) Every single PokéStop and Gym were also Ingress portals. Not every Ingress portal exists in PG, but everything in the release of PG existed within Ingress. In short, Niantic offered us a free game to play, and in exchange, we provided them with millions of dollars in free GPS research and photography. Portal submissions were cut off late last year, to “clear the backlog”, but it’s now clear as to why. But I digress; that is, as a friend from Vermont would say, my “old man yells at cloud” moment.
Why this all matters
Ingress portals, by and large, needed to be significant in some way. We had the church portals, which were the easiest to submit: everything that looked like a church would be accepted. Players went off into the world to submit every church they could find. Cemeteries were an easy submission, as well: have a cool looking grave in an old cemetery? It’s an Ingress portal. Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, Maine contains no less than fifty portals.
The other portals were harder. You needed good pictures, some distance from other portals, solid descriptions. And even then, Niantic may or may not accept the submission. This speaks to the problem we are seeing today: playing Pokémon while black is hard both because everything is harder while black in America, and because of a simple lack of portals in black neighborhoods. Some criticisms of this have revolved around the white, more affluent Ingress players and their playing habits. But I offer a different argument: disinvestment.
Disinvestment as destroyer of augmented reality
The Greater Ville, a neighborhood located in North St. Louis, is well beyond the “Delmar Line” where diversity ends. Populations in these neighborhoods typically are above 95% black. The black population, once segregated into these neighborhoods, thrived together and built a neighborhood they could be proud of. A black person did not need to leave the Ville to obtain anything needed for daily life. After desegregation, many were able to chase their dreams and move to North County to establish themselves there. What remained in North St. Louis was a population of concentrated poverty and a neighborhood filled with empty homes which continue to crumble over time. Small businesses, now lacking customers, closed their doors. The thriving St. Louis, much like Detroit, became a ghost town — a shadow of its former self, with only a third of the population.
The Land Reutilization Authority, the municipal organization responsible for holding lots that went unsold at tax sales, holds over ten thousand lots in its inventory. Costs to build or remodel homes go far beyond what their value will be when completed. The only present hope exists in nonprofits and other developers utilizing tax credits to build and remodel homes, because no other project is affordable.
This is the world into which we lay Ingress and PG upon.
A vicious cycle
When the players of Ingress set out to deploy portals, they didn’t discriminate. Some believe that players may have chosen not to submit a portal request in a black neighborhood. This may be true of some players, but not for all. In-game, there was a “Seer” badge, one that a player received based on how many portals they submitted. If one player wouldn’t go into a black neighborhood, another would see opportunity there and try themselves. Portals either do not exist because Niantic rejected them or because there just weren’t any, and the likelihood is the latter.
In turn, the other connected feature between the games — Exotic Matter (XM) in Ingress and the appearance of Pokémon in PG — was directly connected to populations with cell phones and populations who played Ingress. A downtown with a few portals and stores will have more of both, a quiet residential area will have neither. To play heavily, you have to go where the action is. In turn, nothing ever happens in North City. And so the cycle repeats.
Quite simply, the lack of investment and development that caused North St. Louis and other urban areas to crumble is the very reason black people need to come to either white or otherwise developed areas to play Pokémon. There is no black downtown in the Ville anymore to load up with portals, encouraging a journey from one area to the next. There is precious little history to admire, despite it being the birthplace of many famous people. The home of the family whose Supreme Court case, Shelley vs. Kraemer, once ended racial deed restrictions on housing is ironically itself surrounded by urban decay.
Conclusion
In other words — there is no augmented reality, because reality for a black player in a black neighborhood is no different in the game. Ingress’s catchphrase, “The world is not as it seems”, could not be more false in disinvested urban centers across America. The world is exactly as it seems in these neighborhoods — often empty and devoid of hope. As a social worker, I hope that this will not be the case forever.