To be, or not to be

By the look of it, the game is set so that the followers of either faction can spin their own mythos any which way they want so they can feel they are on the right side, ideologically speaking. As it turns out, statistically, only half of the players chose a team based on the in-game storyline anyway—the other half defers to other more practical determining factors.

Ideologically speaking, if this were something other than make-believe, one would be hard-pressed to make a choice. I imagine the Nuremberg Code would have to be of some relevance, here.

One way to look at it, subjecting uninformed populations to the influence of Exotic Matter (which is what theoretically is done in Ingress, in terms of game mechanics, when "mind-units" are "captured" within a green triangle field) without the informed consent of those populations is tantamount to, say, adding a foreign substance like LSD or DMT to the drinking water without people's knowledge.

BUT THEN AGAIN, it could be as easily argued that considering that the majority of the people in question is already brainwashed by the Man (I mean, can we really speak of "informed consent," when people are led unknowingly into military and/or economic ventures they understand nothing about?), maybe a good dose of LSD or Ayahuasca (or... NZT, anyone?) in the drinking water is something that, maybe, the world could use after all—who knows?



See? I just argued both sides of the (same?) coin.



This reminds me of a Bertrand Russell quote:

"To be perfectly intelligible one must be inaccurate, and to be perfectly accurate, one must be unintelligible."