There’s an old joke about someone who is lost while out for a drive. He pulls over and asks a passing local how to get to a certain address. The local tries to give him directions, then gives up, saying, “Well, If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here!”
It sometimes strikes me that the same is true of many other aspects of modern life. If we’d known how something was going to turn out like it did, we’d have started it differently in the first place. If someone today tried to develop, promote and retail a substance which had already been proved beyond doubt to cause cancer, would they be allowed to sell smoking tobacco? I doubt that very much, but we have that evidence and yet the product remains legal.
So there are two issues at stake here. One is a guessing game- foresight. Where are we going? What decisions should we make, and where might they take us? What is just around the corner? What are the implications if we get this wrong? And the other is looking back: hindsight. How did we get here? What did we do wrong? How lucky/unlucky were we? Should we still be doing this? Should we change things back to how they were? Every moment brings decisions, forks in the roads of our life, where we make either a conscious decision, or, inadvertently, default to a particular position.
Geocaching has changed and developed; changes in the past have had an enduring effect upon our present game. Looking back, should we have made those changes? Geocaching, like most games, began as a simple activity: hide something > invite someone to find it > log that they found it. From that simple concept, the game expanded in terms of scope, location, player profile, availability. There were now multi-location caches, cache series, puzzles and mystery caches, letterbox hybrids, as well as Virtual caches, EarthCaches and events.
When the first Event cache was published in March 2001, no one could possibly have foreseen the development of large camping events, the World Wide Flash Mob, CITO, Mega events, and certainly not Giga events, where 5,000 or more players all gather together! I know a number of people for whom event caching is the biggest part of their game, travelling to several events in a day, vying with others to host more events than others. If we had been able to predict this popularity, would we have done things differently though? Perhaps more than any other aspect of the game, events have manifested themselves differently in different cultures. I’ve attended events in Germany, Spain and Hong Kong among other places, as well as here in the UK, and they all have their own flavour. Rules imposed on the nature and style of events would have robbed us of this local expression. The only significant changes which have affected events here in the UK related to so-called event stacking, and are demonstrably a good thing!
There are two cache types which have never really taken off in the same way as others- Wherigo and Letterbox hybrid caches. The once exciting new technology of Wherigo has been surpassed by AR, Adventure Labs and primarily by the flexibility and immediacy of mobile caching. The effort required to download a Wherigo cartridge, find an app that works well, play the game or puzzle and then still have to log the cache on a separate app, stands in huge contrast to the slick experience which has been brought to the game by the improved Geocaching , Cachly, C:Geo and Adventure Lab apps, among others. The Lua code required to create a cartridge is also clunky and obscure, and very few players have the skills or patience to create anything but the most basic experiences, myself included. Groundspeak has all but given up on Wherigo, with almost no recent development. Surely they will soon swing their axe once more, grandfather Wherigo and put the whole sorry show out of its misery!
The Letterbox Hybrid cache type was introduced to make the link with Geocaching’s ancestor, the pastime known as Letterboxing. Letterboxing included many of the features now associated with Geocaching, but without the use of GPS. The use of a rubber ink stamp for logging finds is often included in Letterbox hybrid caches. However, the main distinguishing feature of Letterboxing was the use of instructions, directions and bearings to lead the player to the hidden box. For the large part this is rarely used now and the only difference between this type and a traditional cache tends to be the inclusion of a stamp. Given that many don’t even include this, and that logging in geocaching is all online, there is little difference between the two. Stamps could be included in trads, caches with directions could be listed as ‘Mystery’ caches. Letterbox Hybrids have had their day and should also be grandfathered. Again, if we knew how things would turn out, Letterbox caches would never have been developed and the time has surely come to put them to bed.
Other technologies which were not widely available in 2000, such as QR codes and mobile phones, have spawned other games, such as Munzee and Pokemon Go. Geocaching has embraced these to a certain extent, with experiments in AR and players including all sorts of tricks in their mystery caches. Players have changed too. A younger generation who are natives in this great undiscovered country, expect to be able to pick up their phone, download an app and go. Their investment is shallow, unlike when I first shelled out for a £350 GPSr unit! This has resulted in an exponential rise in the number of players but also, probably, in turnover. They come and they go. The development of apps has brought a new source of income to Groundspeak, but in many ways doesn’t sit comfortably with the structures of a game first conceived more than two decades ago. For some, the move has been away from one of trust and honesty to one requiring proof and suspicion, and yet logging a cache still relies on an player writing their name by hand on a small piece of damp paper. There is no such ambiguity with a scanned QR code!
The future for geocaching is bright, unpredictable and thrilling, but the road ahead twists and turns, and is pitted with doubt and caution; the road behind is is straight and clear but blocked with regret and longing.
A Wright Feb & April 2022
