Portal Scanning, a Cautionary Tale
I was relatively excited to earn a new badge this weekend, that fingerprint thing has a lovely design. Now, I’m a mostly walking-only player, making those “long links” and “portal capture” points is a bit of a stretch for me. And so, portal scanning it is, at 16 points a pop. 125? Onerous but doable, so I guess I’m just aiming for Bronze. Too much else to do to spend more days aiming higher, such is life.
My best friend made plans with me to drive to a neighbouring town, the quaint and historic one that attracts tourists and has nice parks, dense uncaptured portals, and makes for a nice spot to visit during these gaming events. She has a car, and so had a little bit of a head start on me on her EOS points.
We made our way to the pretty park in central downtown, enthusiastic doggie in tow, and started our wandering. It’s a lovely warm and sunny day, perfect for this. Of course we brought our battery packs, knowing in advance that constant camera usage would be killer on our phones.
She got a further head start on me, while I struggled to get any Scans accomplished at all. With the very sunny day and the iPhone’s tendency to be immensely hard to read in full daylight, at first I didn’t realize my scans were failing. I could see the prompts but couldn’t read the washed out text. Partly my fault, because I had indeed successfully done Scans in the past, so assumed they were still working now. I was quite ready to give up on the badge once I realize how much time I’d just wasted, but google pointed me at a Reddit page that gave some advice that worked. If your portal scans are failing, gah, turn this off in Settings:
That finally sorted, we wandered the park some more, circling plaques and statues and benches. Our fellow park visitors may have been curious about what we were doing, but it’s really not so unusual for people to photograph and video the things in the park.
After some time she earned her Bronze badge and decided it was time to head home. I still needed quite a few points yet (math said 99.1 Scans’ worth left), but I can hardly begrudge her tiredness, still recovering from Long Covid and all. On the drive back to our city I managed some captures and glyph hacks at least.
I got dropped off at the mall for my weekly errands and a late lunch, where I also managed to get some more Scans done at the initially-empty coin operated play area. After some 20 minutes of walking back and forth there, I was finally interrupted when a trio of unsupervised preteen boys decided it was a good time to burn a bunch of toonies on the carousel; time then to finish my groceries and head home.
I recharged all the things (batteries, not portals), and math said I needed exactly 75 more Scans to achieve bronze. I was now caught up on Simon and Mark’s CtC videos, so walked to the also-busy downtown park to finish off my onerous task.
This was where the incident occurred.
It started off well enough, I’d first popped in to the corner store for a drink, it was a warm day and I needed some topping up. I did a few more Scans on the way through, and did manage to avoid hurting my ankle in the flowerbeds Scanning the fountain, but realized how much of a tripping hazard it is there.
Nobody was paying me any mind, but it did have a different feeling to it than earlier, because 1) my city is nice and all, but there’s no “touristy” vibe, 2) I was doing this alone, and a single guy aiming a camera while circling objects apparently has a different vibe, than when he is accompanied by a female doing the same thing.
The pavilion is much too large to easily Scan, but I diligently circled it. The one spot I’d hoped to circle for a while turned out to be more inconvenient than I’d expected, due to a tree blocking the view of the marker stone. So I moved over to where there was a pair of portals I could alternate between: one being the plaque for the park itself, the other being a bench and stone marker memorializing an individual. (That latter portal likely would not have been accepted these days, but it’s grandfathered in from the early days of Ingress.)
Nobody else was in the area when I started, it’s an area mostly shaded by the trees, and people tend to prefer the big open sunnier area on the other side of the pavilion. Empty, until it wasn’t.
I started to hear from off in the distance, one of the downtown’s “denizens” starting to mutter relatively loudly. I couldn’t m.ake out a single word he was saying though. However, I realized after-the-fact that this fellow was the guy who’d some years ago (2019) had been yelling at Pokémon Go players on a Community Day, I guess because he was suddenly surrounded by “cameras” that day.
And then he approached me and directly asked me if I knew “Connie” (the name of the woman the bench/marker were memorializing). Because he was now incredibly concerned at how interested I was in filming said bench, as if I had zero right to be in a public park otherwise minding my own business.
If my brother had not luckily been passing through the park at the same moment, I can’t even guess what would have happened. But now being outnumbered, he didn’t much feel comfortable yelling at me any more I guess, and he finally walked off, I didn’t see to where or how far.
I’m now down to only needing 12 more scans to get my Bronze. Gah. So close to being finished.
I ended up at the far corner of the park scanning an ugly bench, because the only other alternative was a historical plaque about the park’s famous designer — which happened at the time to have a pair of sunbathers right there, and I’m seriously not one to creepily aim my phone at people like that, despite whatever was going on in that guy’s muddled thinking.
And fortunately for me, the playground was currently under construction, so no single-guy-filming-children-in-the-park issues for me today, at least. And I’m a friendly and familiar face to the other local residents, living and working here and passing through the park on a daily basis, so even if the neighbours were curious, nobody else was worried or alarmed at my new interest in walking in circles around this bench with my phone.
So that’s enough Scanning for me for this event, thank you very much. Even in a very public and busy space like a park, keep your eyes and ears open, and I’d seriously suggest not doing this task alone. Even “normal” people will get weirded out with the incessant camera usage for no apparent reason.
PS. It’s sadly easier to explain to strangers that you’re doing an event for Pokémon Go, than it is to talk about Ingress, a game they’ve never heard of. And it’s basically impossible to explain to non-players what the value of “Scanning” is to Niantic, and how they are employing us gamers to do the dirty work for them, of creating a more immersive 3D AR experience, and even that is most likely for future games, not Ingress itself.
But at least most of you won’t have to try to explain that to camera-phobic h.omeless paranoiacs. For this event I pray that’s just going to be me doing that. Stay safe y’all.


Comments
People just scan the ground. That's what Niantic wants with this event, and that's what they're getting
yeah sadly scanning can lead to some embarassing moments depending where u live since outsiders get the wrong idea what u are doing xD
Last year I had someone get out their phone and call the police (although I suspect they were actually pretending) - they then followed me around ostensibly until the police arrived (but they never did, and eventually the person gave up).
The portal in question was a couple of storeys up on a wall above a shop front - the portal description claims that it was bricked up during the Window Tax era and has since been painted to look like a not-very-convincing window - and the person who accosted me claimed that he owned the building that I was filming.
Agree. I definitely feel like a ****
I swear, you people find ways to create drama for yourselves. I scanned 214 portals at the University of Michigan and the busiest streets in Ann Arbor this weekend. Standing right in front of restaurants waving my phone around like a weirdo, then walking down the street to the next restaurant. (We have too many restaurant portals in this town.) The only comment I got was from somebody who assumed I was really into architecture.
When someone complains about you doing something that isn't illegal, ignore them or tell them to mind their own business. Standing up for yourself (even when you're being a weirdo) is part of being an adult.
I'm gonna reiterate, that the individual who accosted me is literally somebody who has had multiple prior incidents of following and yelling at local players, and is quite rather paranoid about any and all camera usage around him. I try to be compassionate in general, and even knowing that his brain is broke and that it isn't really his fault, I muchly prefer to avoid being near him. I'm still kind of crossing my fingers that he's not going to follow me around in the future, but hopefully that's future me's problem at best.
He's not the only h.omeless or disturbed person in my downtown, he's just the most ... directly confrontational one of them.
It was only about a minute before I'd registered that he was even there in the park that day, and when he aggressively approached me, he definitely wasn't there when I'd started Scanning in the area.
Y'all do speak the truth, mostly. Nobody else had an issue with me circling rocks and statues and memorials at all the rest of the day, neither in the park nor in the church cemeteries, and we were quite happy to explain ourselves to the few curious enough to ask us anything. But regardless of all that, I also went out of my way to not do this obviously-filming thing while pointing at children or sunbathers. If you just use common sense and luckily avoid aggressive paranoiacs, you'll "probably" be fine I'm sure.
Welp, lightship scanning is not compatible with my device anyways, so I guess I dodged a bullet.
I'm already on my way to gold (almost 5000 points and 100 scans ready to upload). I started this event by doing some portal captures, but now all I do is just select a portal easy to scan, and throw a bunch of scans at it (I don't want to aim randomly). Go home, then upload. I'm not used to scanning, so my Scout was bronze and now is silver...
This is like revisiting how you first went to portals in Ingress. At first, it was being paranoid but at the end of the day - you will only draw attention to yourself if you act like it's weird. Take a clue from the game launch message - be aware of your surroundings. Scan portals in which you feel comfortable doing. I have scanned locations in which if I lift up my camera, it's not going to make other people think of what I'm doing. Portals that are already flat on the ground help. I'm just mindful of the area when I scan. You're not going to get every one at once and it's ok to take multiples.