Let me start by saying I’m doing fine in Ingress. I play just enough to stay engaged in the ebb and flow of Enlightenment field coverage in my neighborhood, but not so much that I get a carpal tunnel flare up. (How do I know such flare ups can happen? Experience.) I’m level seven, and I have a good time wandering around with my boyfriend blowing up portals and executing complicated field series.

I am just stewing with competitive jealousy that he has 100k more AP than me.

He probably has more than that by now.

I can check his stats. *Checks stats* He actually has 103k more AP than me.

When we first started, I progressed faster than he did because I had more free time. I felt bad about that and would magnanimously give him keys or let him take that last link to make a field so he could get the points. Things continued this way for a while with me leveling up slightly sooner than he did.

Then he started playing on his lunch break, and suddenly he was tens of thousands of AP ahead of me. I could barely keep up. I have two things against me: our neighborhood is not as densely portaled as the neighborhood his office is in and my super ancient phone.

My phone works very hard. I should be happy it hangs on as long as it does. After about an hour of Ingress, it is a hot, angry slab of gorilla glass in my hand, wheezing its way through each hack as I stab aggressively at its unresponsive screen. I dropped my phone of comparable functionality to my boyfriend’s eight months ago, smashing the screen to unusable bits. I was lucky this one still worked so I didn’t have to drop 450 bucks just to keep up my smartphone lifestyle.

My boyfriend’s phone sails through hacks rapidly and can even claim portals from a moving vehicle.

I’m happy he has found something he enjoys doing during lunch that gives him a break during his day. And it’s cool he’s so into it. But-

I STILL WANT TO DOMINATE ALL OF THE THINGS.