Endgame is Google’s international augmented reality game

At its simplest, Endgame: The Calling is a novel about 12 teenagers scattered around the globe, participating in a high-stakes competition with the threat of the apocalypse and near-certain death looming. But the Endgame universe sprawls much further than a single book. Endgame will eventually combine three novels with a host of other material, including shorter novellas, movies, and alternate-reality games (some of which lead to massive cash prizes of real gold) put together by Google’s Niantic Labs. It’s an ambitious, sprawling, potentially messy, potentially engrossing project that could only take place now, in a world where billions of the Earth’s inhabitants carry extremely powerful computers in their pockets everywhere they go.