Saturday, July 13, 2013

Ingress: Many Many Teams But Only Two Global Teams



There are some basic premises.

(1) This is a game. It is supposed to be fun. This is not a corporate project. There is no boss. Much of the fun in the game comes from the human interactions and the human frailties.

(2) The number one rule in Ingress leadership is you can't tell anyone what to do. But with their consent you can suggest things and share tips and wisdom.

(3) There are only two global teams possible. That is just the way the game has been designed.

Both sides already have started with city teams. The city teams on both sides all over the world cropped up pretty much independent of each other. So the challenge is not what you do when more than one team shows up. The challenge is how do you bring about communication and coordination among teams across a country, a continent, perhaps to span the globe.

There is room for multiple Resistance teams in New York City. I think team building should be encouraged. First of all it is a scalability issue. A G+ group past 500 members does not make a lot of sense. Maybe 200 is a healthy number. Beyond that a group, any group, should do an amoeba split. When you move from 500 to 2,000 agents in the city, some neighborhoods will qualify to have their own groups. Borough groups will no longer be enough. I know I want a Greater Jackson Heights group.

I have met many agents whom I have told, "My team is not the right team for you, you should join the other team." The Squad is not for everyone.

There is a cross faction hangout that popped up in my Gmail yesterday, and most of the usual suspects showed up, chief among them the Keyser. Maybe there is room for a cross-faction squad, and there is room for The Squad to coordinate with the existing organized Resistance team(s) in the city.

At some point the city might graduate to having rival L8 farms sitting side by side, permanently, because we want to seek new challenges other than building and killing L8 farms. Similarly the teams in the city will perhaps graduate to thinking team building is a welcome phenomenon. It is just like farm building, or home territory building. The goal should be communication and coordination, not name calling on the COMM.
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