Are you ready for a mission?
Players have the opportunity to choose a number of portals and define the way that other players need to interact with those portals. Once all the tasks have been done and the mission is completed the mission player gets a pre-defined badge.
What is cool about missions is that usually locals will create those. Mostly they want to make them interesting and will chose portals of special interest. This means completing a mission will take you along nice points of interest and sometimes areas that would otherwise might go unnoticed.
Extending missions do become mosaics
Sometimes very creative things can happen that the game designer didn’t think of. With Ingress it has to do with the way that the mission badges are displayed on the screen.
As you can see there are six badges in a row. Some genius looked and that and thought: “what if the pictures line up in a way that it becomes a bigger picture?” And this is when mosaics were born.
But a mosaic can not only be a banner like this example from Dublin. It can create bigger pictures as well. Sometimes really huge pictures.
The example of London on the right side consists of individual 66 missions, takes you roughly 25 km (~ 15,5 miles) to complete and lets you run through all of central London.
Ingress mosaics make sure that I walk a lot, find places that I haven’t thought of and are a nice souvenir when I am home. Of course they are not the only way I get information about a place. But a very nice addition.
How do you get inspired when being in a new city? Any unusual ways?