2300: Buried Treasure

Andie and I were both feeling a bit sorry for ourselves earlier (well, emphasis on me, somewhat; recent life has been getting me down a bit. All right, a lot.) so we decided to go out and do something together rather than sitting at opposite ends of the house playing computer games and not talking to each other.

Andie’s sister Michelle had taken her Geocaching a while back, so she suggested we give it a try. Geocaching is something I’ve been meaning to try for a while but never got around to; it’s also something that, I feel, is more fun with other people in tow, as you can put your heads together to solve problems then.

For the unfamiliar, Geocaching is a sort of real-world game that you play using a GPS-equipped phone, a pen and possibly some digging implements, tweezers and bramble-proof clothing. Hidden caches are marked on your map; you have to find them. Whoever hid the cache leaves a description, a hint and perhaps a hint photo to help you find them, then when you find it you open it, write your name and the date on the bit of paper inside it, log it on the website or phone app, then put it back so someone else can find it at a later date.

That’s about it for the basics, really. There are different types of caches, including those that you’re only “allowed” to register if you’ve fulfilled certain conditions beforehand, and those that hide their final location behind a series of riddles, but yes; the basic formula is go to place, find thing, log thing, put thing back.

What I find interesting (and pleasing) about the whole thing is that it’s all built on trust, and people appear to stick to this honour system. I don’t see any trolling on the cache pages, and I don’t see any evidence of people deliberately and maliciously moving or hiding caches somewhere other than where they’re supposed to be — both things I would have thought would be a risk with this sort of activity. But, at least in my local area, I haven’t seen anything like that so far, though admittedly I’ve been out on just one excursion so far.

I think part of the reason that there’s no trolling involved is that, despite technically being a “game” of sorts, Geocaching has very little in the way of actual “gamification”, to use the buzzword that was popular a few years back. In other words, there’s no scoring points, no earning experience, no levelling up, no badges — just a simple count of how many caches you’ve found and a map that gradually fills up with smiley faces as you successfully find the hidden goodies secreted at the various locations around your area — or indeed the area that you happen to be in, since one of the fun things about it is that you don’t have to limit yourself to the local area, and can instead participate in it as an activity wherever you happen to be, assuming there are some caches hidden nearby.

It was a fun afternoon, then, and a pleasant way to spend a Saturday in the sunshine — though after all the walking we did we were both more than ready for a long sit down by the time we finished. I’m looking forward to giving it another try in the near future; there are still lots to find around Southampton, and I bet there’s a whole bunch out in the New Forest, too…