Ingress

When Niantic Labs @ Google announced Ingres,  I was very excited and immediately signed up for the beta.  But when I got in,  and tried the concept of real life gaming overlay,  or want nearly as cool as i had thought it would be.

I was expecting a treasure hunt and to find gold occasionally,  but not to be playing against others.  And I remembered why I have up so easily when playing first-person shooters in the early days. I want expecting to be the prey.

Granted it is somewhat possible to get around Ingres undetected,  collecting XM being anonymous.  But as soon as you begin to interact with a portal,  building or hacking,  you garner the ire of real people.  Some players are trolls, some protectors,  some warriors, and some are rogues,  but all are players and in the real world too.   There isn't much to escape back to once you've left the game.

I played for several weeks in the beta release.  My game crashed or seized often and it was discouraging.  But I reset and continued on.  I played for the Enlightened because I saw them as the Alliance from Blizzard's World of Warcraft. I played Horde for nearly 8 years,  and I wanted to see the enemy's territory from their eyes.

Of course Ingres is not much, if at all,  like WoW, but there are still sides, communications, and targets to consider.  There is no hand-to-hand combat,  only the indirect conflict of node generation and destruction.  It is however on a global scale and for a game that is free, making the stage the whole planet is fairly impressive.

What I could really go for is Google Glass or some other heads up display for a more realistic augmented reality feel. And maybe some gun-toting robots... yeah BIG, gun-toting robots.