Okay so, yeah I'm glad you stopped doing that. It's funny to me because nobody plays Ingress in Boulder. Like, no one. So I guess that made our experiences different (I say made because that shit MURDERS my battery so I stopped playing). But for me it was basically just walking around and taking portals alone in the city. I found some places I didn't know about, so that was cool. But from a design perspective it seems like a two-sided faction is a shitty way of doing this. There's this game called Infinity Blade, and one of the cool things they did was have a boss that had like 100000000 HP and everyone around the world had to team up and fight it to beat it. HabitRPG does the same thing. It would be cool if there was an ARG that did something similar, but that was less of a grind. More cooperative, I guess. Or at least put more factions in. And stop collecting my data Google, goddammit. These thoughts are scattered, but I have to shave before class now so I can't write any further. Man, screw shaving. "Congratulations on the deeper voice, bet nobody told you that Arab genes mean hair will try to escape from every pore on your face every day for the rest of your life."
The real problem that ARGs face, I think, is the die-off. Nobody wants to play them for more than a few weeks unless they're hardcore. With a game like Ingress, that means you've got the hardcore constantly picking off the newbs. If it were EVE or the like, the Newbs would be on their own playing field where they would be more than grist for the mill; on a game like Ingress it would only double the overhead to have a L1-8 game and a L8-16 game. But yeah. Crips v. Bloods is a shitty setup. It turns Risk into Checkers. PS. I've been shaving daily since 8th grade and I'm about as Arabic as Bjork.