Augmented regionalism: Ingress as geomediated gaming narrative

Through narrative analysis of the Google game Ingress, ways that information and communications technologies are able to use storytelling to negotiate complex relationships between the regional and the global are considered.

Abstract

As new mobile and gaming technologies become increasingly ubiquitous, they encourage new modes of storytelling and engagement. This article focuses on the Google game Ingress, which combines augmented reality with geomedia to create a robust and complex digital narrative. More importantly, Ingress combines globalism with regionalism in a way that rewrites the regional as global, and vice versa. In turn, the transformative nature of the smaller real-world regionalist narratives help to lend ethos to the overarching globalist (fictional) narrative within the game world. Through narrative analysis of this transmedia game world and community, this article considers ways that information and communications technologies are able to use storytelling to negotiate complex relationships between the regional and the global.