I am not a gamer, I don't play games. Ingress oiled my brain gears, smoothed my memory and widened my roadtrips and astrophotography destinations.

First time Ingress (The Game) was introduced to me was in Hamburg attending the CCC Hackers conference , I was happy being surrounded by underground hackers from across the globe playing with their blue/green GPS application. Agent @DrMobileOne briefed me about the game and recruited me to the resistance. I came back in town with all intention of being the 1st to play it the area, downloaded the app and hop! The sky is green, greeeen everywhere, green green green greeeeen. For over 2 months, it impossible to break a single portal with my low level XMPs. My GPS stayed green until some friends and I reached Level 6...and then was Change.

Now after 3 months in the game I am lvl9, each time I try egressing Ingress it sucks me back in. During the leveling-up period, I noticed that Ingress is not just a data mining monster but also a social experiment. It's always intriguing to observe how agents play each with specific pattern, how their cute inner monsters are triggered, how they interact with the game, within the game, intra-faction and cross-faction behaviorism. The amount of obsession IS TOO DAMN HIGH! This is not dangerous as long as obsession is not affecting players' health...the mental part of it.
Now that I took a small break from playing (just a regular check), I decided to write down my observations about Ingress form a social experiment perspective.

The Lucifer Effect - We can all be Mother Theresa and Saddam Hussein

• Prisoners started becoming crazy
• 1/3 of the guards started developing sadistic tendencies
• Most guards were upset after ceasing the experiment

Hunters/Gatherers - Hunters/Farmers

Before early human beings took to farming the land, all people were hunter-gatherers - that is, they plant their farms locally and go out for hunting. It later evolved to breaking down into sub-groups of only-hunters and only-gatherers, working altogether synegized, the same how the game evolved in Ingressly active areas.
In Ingress, you have to gather (farm for items) so you can acquire/take-down portals and secure your territory*. Farming is the key to vitality, always starving for glyphs and keys, to nourish and expand.

Defining and Securing your territory*

Also relates to hunters/gatherers society, once nomads realized that living in communities is strategically quitessential for individual security, they stabilized in groups within defined territories. It's not always the case in Ingress, stop feeding your revenge each time your home and work portal is bombarded, for this, equals more APs. You can bombard the other faction's territories for many other reasons.

Social Awkwardness

Some players take the game very seriously and are willing to start a real fight on the streets. Calm your tits, sit back relax and pay your psychologist a visit. Your game addiction might be nothing but a compensation for weaknesses, frustrations, desires, or feelings of inadequacy or incompetence in one life area.

Both factions

Ingress gamers come with a vast array of psyche shades disregarding their faction. For me there are two factions, the Social and Anti-social one (cross-cross-faction). Ingress made me connect with many interesting people from both sides. Who needs LinkedIn after all?
Having said that, agents have the right to remain undercover, and this should be respected by every player.

Politics / War strategy

Many Ingressians prefer to play it solo, for eveyone else it's a strategy game that requires thinking, physical effort, patience and time. Ingress players think strategy in mind in each step they make and every move they take. And since planning and executing operations require resources, those resources can be jeopardized by bits of misstep or information leakage; thus rises all the war aspects such as Intelligence, Counter Intelligence, The elemement of Distration, the Element of Surprise and maintaining the Balance of Terror.

There is also a book called "The art of Ingress", an E-book written by agent @gsf that adapts the "Art of War" (by Sun Tzu) to Ingress.

Other war/political aspects on Ingress

The guardian portal is earned and not given, If the opposite faction helped you achieve it then you don't deserve it.

While some players count it as a 'prestige', this badge is the most controversial aspect in the game: it is the weakest portal in a game of a grinding power, easily identifiable and destroyable. 

This portal is not labeled with your name, it's simply a portal similar to any other one. If a player destroyed your guardian, blame your failure in securing it not the one who killed it. That being said (of course ;p), it's always very interesting to obseve changes in different agents' behavior before and after gaining the Black Guardian Badge. (politics politics politics ;D). Recently, and due to many Intel Srapping methodologies from both factions, the Guardian portal has become useless and worthless - but always interesting to observe from a Game Theory perspective.

Hiding behind your agent name

Ingress doesn't create people's personalities, it simply amplifes some aspects and reflects psychologocal tendencies, it unleashes the inner monster society have developed in gamers. If an agent is smart, stupid, cheater and/or bully in the game, that's only because, disregarding his faction, that agent is smart, stupid, cheater and/or bully in real life.

Cheating

According to "The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty", a book by Dan Ariely (one of my favorites): "We Lie to Everyone -- Especially Ourselves". Referring to that book, there are many forces that shape dishonesty, clearly, there are so many MORE forces that tend to increase dishonesty than decreasing it. Those forces are:

• Lack of supervision / Public shame / Moral reminders (also related to the possibility of getting caught)
• Ability to rationalize the case to self-convince that cheating/lying is justifiable
• Creativity
• Culture, that gives examples of dishonesty

According to other statistics and social experiments conducted in that book, the more cheating is distant from money than its value, the more cheating occurs. A human will more likely steel a ticket that `values` 50USD than steeling a 50USD bill.

That being applied to Ingress, most types of cheating are hard to detect, you have to have a solid report with non-repudiated evidence. Cheater or no-cheater, who cares? Most players are cheaters with different amounts and ratios and they will always find a way convince themselves they aren't. Remember a bank account is considered cheating, same as playing girlfriend's, wife's or pet's account.

Once you cheat you are in, you will lose the thrill part of the game, you will start caring about your opponents' loss more than your team's triumph.

Prisoners' dilemma

I couldn't describe it better than "Cornell University" in their course blog, I ended up quoting them word-by-word (Game Theory in Video Games: How You’re in a Prisoners' Dilemma):

"Here you can see where the game theory is important to the discussion. Clearly the best option for everybody is the Support their team and work together for a win. You get to have some fun playing and also get to win the game. That position is Nash equilibrium.  But in the real world you can see that if you are fearful that somebody will choose to break free from this Nash equilibrium, you are better off hedging your bets and assuring that you receive at least 2 points but playing for fun. That is why you will often see experienced players forming perfect team compositions and gladly taking a supportive role. But newer players, who lack to experience, will play for fun and cause the players around them to play for fun as well." - TheRealHumanzeell

Privacy / Cyber Security

Cyber security is associated to human safety - violating someone's private life might potentially lead to human un-safties. That being said, never violate agents' privacies especially by mentioning their real names or sharing their home locations. When someone violates your privacy don't engage with the conversation, simply report it to Nia, they seriously take privacy issues.

Is Ingress private? Yes and No. It's your call:
Due to the COMM and other 3rd party applications, your ex-girlfriend can always trace back to your deployed resonators on your current boyfriend's home portal.

Your real name will be part of many entries in the opposite faction's database: your work, home, car brand, type and plate. Your privacy as human can only be managed, as long as a Chinese Wall separates your real identity from your code name, pretty hectick but possible.

Why do people play ingress?

Fishing about this question over the internet led me to a reddit topic 'Why do you play Ingress', below are gathered top comments:

• I'm currently playing the game to decompress from work, stress-release like hell! - FelisApplique
• I love being the disrupter - TheCorruptor
• To show my dominance, mark my turf. People where fed up with me pissing on statues, so they made ingress for me - bassiek
• I like the secret agent feeling. That and I like to get out - dotcom101010
• In the end it's not easy to be a Yoda and not misuse your power! -  Jon Rodriguez
• It gives me a reason to go out more often and visit/discover places I haven't been before - TheVirtualVortex
• But I think 90% of the players do it because of the competition. They get really into the whole "defeat the other team" thing. - vibrunazo
• I've developed multiple biking routes around my house based on portal locations. - DoWhileGeek
• Although sometimes it is great fun to drink with both factions :) - skyhawkecks

The answers above represent a sample of why poeple think they play Ingress, but they don't answer the obsession behind. I think, and from a subjective point of view, we do obsess about this game in particular because it connects us back to the basic instinct that reside inside us all, the PID=0, Hunting, Gathering and Securing the territory.
 

Is it just a game?

When first installing the game, it paradoxically introduces itself as: "this might seem like a game, but it's not", analogizes to a person saying: "Believe me, I am liar ".
Would you believe this person as being a liar? Or just disbelief this person as being honest?
Ingress is a strange loop looping inside the strange strange loop of life, I think I should play it more often.