Designing Place-Based Games (Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk)

At the end of April, I gave a lunchtime talk at the Pervasive Media Studio, located in Watershed on Bristol's historic harbourside, which hosts a diverse community of artists, academics, technologists and businesses exploring creative technology and experience design.

Since July last year, I have been part of the Pervasive Media Studio community myself, as part of my post-doctoral research role at UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre. Now thoroughly embedded in the life of the PM Studio, I wanted to use the opportunity of a lunchtime talk to share insights from my creative practice and research into designing games that engage with place.

Not only was the aim to  give some practical tips for those designing (location-based) games, but to provide something thought-provoking or inspirational for those interested in engaging with place across any kind of interactive or digitally-mediated experience.

The Pervasive Media Studio's talks take place every Friday at 1pm, both in the building and streamed live online via YouTube. You can watch the recorded stream of my talk above, which also has BSL interpretation.

           

Wandering Games Conference 2019: Theorising wandering game experiences: post-phenomenology, navigation and narrative

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Below is the written component of the paper I presented at the Wandering Games Conference on the 12^th July 2019. The superscript numbers in the text indicate the number of the corresponding slide you should view in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can access the slides separately as a PDF here).

I’d like to thank Melissa Kagen, Eben Muse and all the staff and student helpers at Bangor University that made such an endlessly inspiring conference happen. It was probably my favourite academic event of all time in how it brought together such a warm and passionate group of people over shared interests and loves, and I really hope Wandering Games returns for another conference next year.         

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When¹ we talk about the unique qualities of games in which we wander – whether we’re traversing virtual or physical worlds – what do we refer to? We might describe the rules² (or lack thereof) that determine how we wander; what roles we play in the world of the game. We might describe the process³ of navigating – how the ways we wander the game environments impact our relationships with them. And we might talk about the outcomes⁴ of playing these games – we might describe events and encounters that occurred as we wandered, and how the journey made us feel.

Essentially, with wandering games we distinguish something unique in the relationships between players and their environment, which differs⁵ from other types of games where one’s surroundings might be seen more as a backdrop to the gameplay, or a territory upon which gameplay unfolds. Rather, the environment, and how we traverse it, is central to the meaning-making process that occurs during wandering games. In geographical terms⁶, we could say that we’re distinguishing between game spaces and game places.

In this presentation, I want to demonstrate the usefulness of geographical approaches for making sense of the meaning-making process that takes place in wandering games. By understanding their unfolding interrelationships of bodies, social relationships and technologies as a form of dwelling in place, we can not only better understand the ways that players play and experience wandering games, but think about their potential for enabling practices of design and play that articulate different ways of being in the world.

To do this, I’m going to draw on research involving both video games and physical location-based games. The first is a study⁷ of walking simulator video games, in which I carried out autoethnographic playing of 12 walking sims and interviewed their developers. The second⁸ is a long-term study of the GPS-based treasure-hunting game Geocaching, for which I’ve also used autoethnography, as well as analysing geocache descriptions⁹ and the logs other players have left after finding the hidden containers.

I’m going to talk about two key aspects of the place-making process that occurs in these games: emplacement¹⁰ – how information is positioned in the game’s world to elicit certain kinds of responses, and what kinds of information; and enaction¹¹ – how players engage with and make sense of this information as they wander, and the situated acts and inconsistencies these forms of wandering might entail.

Together¹², this discussion will point towards experiences of dwelling in the worlds of wandering games as something assembled contingently, between connections and disconnections of human and non-human agents that unfold through the navigational gameplay. I’ll finish by explaining how this way of thinking can help us get to grips with what these games do, and what they can allow us to do as designers and players.

As¹³ we wander through the environment of a game, our feelings and perceptions will be shaped by what we encounter and the information we glean from the world, whether it was put there intentionally or not.

In walking simulator games, developers aim to qualify these experiences through environmental storytelling – whereby the construction of a narrative relies on the player’s navigation between pieces of information purposefully embedded across the game’s environment, and the interpretations they make from these evocative narrative elements.

In Geocaching¹⁴, we might say that this informational ‘environment’ is expanded to include all the materials players can use to find a geocache: the description and hints available on the cache webpage, curated by its owner, and past activity logs. Players then determine how this information corresponds to what they encounter physically.

But what does this distribution of information across the environments of these games achieve?

Most notably¹⁵, it allows players to choose what they focus on – a function Michael Nitsche calls ‘dynamic focalization’. The meanings that players derive from the distributed information are determined by what they notice in the world; and what their inclinations and motivations are as they explore. The possibility of ignoring¹⁶ certain pieces of embedded information means that players can decide the manner in which they want to invest in the world – whether to look in one place as opposed to another; whether to spend a long time piecing together details of what they encounter, or simply find what they need and leave.

By positioning this moment of focalization right at the heart of the game space, the player experience is tailored to their own affective and emotional sensibilities. Navigating¹⁷ the world becomes a personalised event in which the significance of locations in the game environment becomes tied to the interests and urges of the individual player.

Furthermore, many developers seek to invite individual interpretation¹⁸ through the content of these narrative elements themselves, which is often deliberately ambiguous and multi-vocal.

In walking sims, this might come across in the use of symbolism, or artefacts that are written or spoken by multiple characters. While these aesthetic elements have their own voice and perspective, there’s no singular trustworthy narrator to filter what’s meaningful. Players have to decide what’s significant for themselves.

In Geocaching¹⁹, this active encouragement of interpretation is most apparent in the use of hints, which ask the player to apply their interpretation of the words to their surroundings. One of my favourite examples is a geocache I found where the hint was ‘I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day’. At first the phrase seemed to bear no relation whatsoever to my location, until it suddenly clicked that those words are the lyrics to the Red Hot Chili Peppers song ‘Under the Bridge’. Sure enough²⁰, that’s where the cache was located. But I’m also aware of the degree of personalisation that this method provokes, because every time I walk past that particular bridge, I think about that moment of discovery, and often the song comes into my head too!        

I want to emphasise that the relationship between navigation and narrative in games where we wander can be more structured than it appears. Developers typically make their games with the aim of achieving particular emotional effects – effects that can make use of the personal focalization that wandering entails.

For walking simulators²¹, developers use three main methods to achieve this. The first is gating, in which entry and exit points in the world are carefully coordinated to structure the flow of information the player is exposed to. The second²² is signposting, in which light and sound directs the player’s attention towards certain significant elements in their surroundings. And the final²³ method is pacing, in which the spacing between narrative information is carefully managed to elicit dramatic tension and mood.

As you can see, this level of authorship by developers often simply comes down to how players are able to move and act in the game world. Shibolet’s²⁴ excellent paper on the avatar’s movement in Journey, which describes how the ‘story’ of the experience comes into being almost solely through the sense of trajectory you embody as you move across the world, reminds us that game worlds in which we wander are not just a mise-en-scene, but what Andy Lavender calls a mise-en-sensibilité. The emplacement of information is as multimedia as the practice of game playing itself.

Indeed, in Geocaching²⁵, alongside the text we see on the webpage, the way geocaches are hidden is geared towards players sensually engaging with the world through touch; using embodied experience to engage with what the abstract view of GPS coordinates fails to see.

What’s notable, then, about the navigational qualities of wandering games is how the stories that derive from these experiences become personalised to the player²⁶. The constellations of affects and perceptions that players chart become closely mapped onto internal topographies of the self as much as information represented digitally. And this is often deliberate. The designed structure of wandering games can provide opportunities for players to engage on their own terms with aesthetic and kinaesthetic possibilities in the world. They can become gatekeepers to “intimate spatial knowledge”, to quote urban explorer Bradley Garrett, turning the game space into “a place for dwelling rather than merely a territory”.

However²⁷, understanding how this relationship between navigation and narrative plays out in practice is crucial, because games are evental media. Whether you’re loading up software in the case of video games, or heading out for a playful wander in a physical environment, the emplaced information of the game, without input from players, is just static architecture. As Alexander Galloway puts it, games only “exist when enacted”.

So what does enaction mean in the context of wandering games? How do our actions as players lead us to have meaningful experiences?

Let’s start with Geocaching²⁸. When geocachers head out in search for a cache, they travel to the treasure’s listed coordinates on the Geocaching website. While reaching the given coordinates will bring the player within close proximity to the geocache, GPS technology itself is only accurate within a 10-metre radius, and is degraded further by factors such as tree cover.

Yet rather than fostering a detachment from the corporeal game environment, these affordances force you to look up from your device and interact sensually with your physical surroundings to find the hidden container. The limitations of the technology are what provokes this sensual engagement.

In turn²⁹, other players have the agency to hide geocaches in creative or elaborate ways, such as the one shown here. A geocache’s coordinates are there for anyone to see; it’s by engaging sensually with the unique materialities of cache locations that geocachers can feel the sense of empowerment, excitement and intimacy that the treasure-hunting gameplay aims to provoke.

Furthermore, over time many geocachers³⁰, myself included, become more adept at this practice of finding geocaches, learning to recognise signs of disturbed ground, the sensitivity of the app’s GPS compass, and common hiding techniques. Often referred to as the player’s ‘geosenses’ or ‘cacher’s eye’, navigating to geocaches for regular players becomes a process of attunement, whereby technology, gameplay and material environment combine to re-orient bodily senses, and intensify the player’s relationship with their surroundings.

We might liken this process to cognitive mapping³¹ – the performative act of making connections between places and meaningful information, whereby, to quote Lynch³², “nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.” And this can be found in the gameplay of walking sims too, as we navigate the mise-en-sensibilité that developers curate.

The issue with fictional worlds, however, is that the believability of the world – which you could say is the extent to which players are able to form coherent mental maps of it – is potentially more fragile³³ and subjective. Not only are digital games susceptible to technical glitches, such as the problems I discovered in Firewatch with the rendering of textures in certain areas, but also there’s a fine balance for developers to negotiate in terms of exposing information³⁴. They want to do so in a way that elicits emotional engagement, while also leaving enough room for players to stitch together a model of the world that make sense to them.

For example, during my autoethnography of walking sims, in some games I’d question how I discovered narrative information such as diary entries and graffiti that was somehow perfectly positioned to continue a linear story. As my navigation of the world began to feel more authored, the world no longer felt believable as a place, but felt more like a game level, where my own interpretation of events was seemingly less important. At those moments, it didn’t feel like a world I could imagine myself into.

The designers of walking sims aim to manage some of this inconsistency through testing. While many of the technical problems have technical solutions, for walking sims testing also exists to find inconsistencies in how people engage with the world subjectively³⁵. For example, The Chinese Room re-made the world of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture from scratch four or five times, simply because testing revealed that it didn’t ‘feel’ right to people as a Shropshire village. As James Ash observes³⁶, testing is a process that enables developers to “render contingency visible” with the aim that these relationships between technologies, bodies and represented worlds can be re-attuned towards more “positively affective” outcomes.

We’re beginning to see that the relationship between navigation and narrative that develops when we wander in games, which I’m calling a place-making practice, is closely connected to personal embodied³⁷ responses and their social and cultural associations. Only last week, I ran a workshop introducing academics to walking simulators, and some of the people in the room had never even picked up a games console controller before. It was a stark reminder that experiences of playing these games always intersect with age, disability, gender, ethnicity and many other facets of society and culture, whether this is in the playing of the game, or even being able to access and participate in the activity in the first place.

In Geocaching³⁸, we’ve seen this intersection with social and cultural norms play out quite prominently on a larger scale in the public eye, where the gameplay has prompted legal action and security alerts, for example. And though I didn’t experience any barriers to playing the game based on embodied factors alone, as a white, able-bodied male, my participation at times has been restricted in other ways.                          

In the nerve-wracking³⁹ example pictured here, I wasn’t willing to climb to the top of this tree to grab the geocache hidden there as the weather was windy, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to make three points of contact on trunk, contravening the social standards of climbing safety I once learnt. By abandoning my retrieval of the cache, my experience was characterised by situated articulations of material conditions, social norms and bodily capacities which weren’t simply playful or serendipitous, but actively restrictive.

These examples remind us that practices of place-making⁴⁰, and the links we develop between navigation and narrative, aren’t ideologically neutral. As geographer Tim Cresswell has noted in his seminal work In Place / Out of Place, the link between place and ‘belonging’ is central to many relationships of power in societies, particularly when we label certain acts or bodies as being ‘out of place’. Place becomes not just a domain of community or attunement, but also of ‘geographical deviance’ and disconnection.

By recognising the potential of ‘geographical deviance’, however, I want to finish by highlighting how acts of wandering also provide opportunities for transgression. It’s a fairly tame example⁴¹ that I came across during my research, but in the game Gone Home, which allows players to pick up objects and place them wherever they want, some players decided to collect all the items you can pick up in the game and put them in one room; while others curated shrines to the individual characters, rather than leaving the items as they were found. It’s just a small example of the potential of navigation as a transgressive act in wandering games, which can re-write stories of engagement with game places that disrupt established norms and make some of these underlying rules newly visible.

As digital technology⁴² has come to influence the ways we encounter and make sense of the worlds we inhabit, critical thinkers across the arts and humanities have sought to chart the factors that shape our place in the world as humans.

As a distinctly interactive medium, with associated concepts of agency and immersion, for example, games are a particularly useful area of study for getting to grips with our being in the world, and how interrelationships of human and non-human components influence this.

The conception of place⁴³ I’ve been using today is born out of post-phenomenological approaches in Geography, which understand our experiences of being in the world as less about ‘being there’, but more about ‘being with’ – being part of an unfolding ecology of human and non-human agents that assemble contingently and in situ; not solely centred in the human mind.

What I hope to have demonstrated today is that, in the unique ways that wandering in games develops meaningful relationships between individuals and environments, we are talking about practices of place-making. And by understanding⁴⁴ what we mean when we talk about dwelling in place – as something highly personal, sensual, contingent, performative, and potentially transgressive – we can better recognise both the opportunities and limitations that arise from these articulations of bodies, technologies, materials and social norms.

I’m arguing that if we’re going to make games in which the kinds of experiences we want players to have result from developing meaningful relationships with the environment, we need to consider what we mean when we say things like we want to create ‘believable’ or ‘emotionally-engaging’ worlds with a ‘sense of place’.

As a final touchstone⁴⁵ for my presentation, I want to highlight the work of people in games such as Kate Edwards, a high-profile member of the games industry who is employed specifically as a geographical consultant by games companies to critique and help develop their world-building. If you listen to her talks, you’ll find that she has lots of anecdotes about games companies that have wanted to effectively re-write geopolitical history to appeal to certain market, and how she has had to negotiate the impacts and ethics of these kinds of decisions.

As a way of thinking about experience that is highly attuned to materialities, the body, society, culture, geopolitics, and increasingly digital technology, it’s evidence that geographical approaches are well-placed for thinking about the interconnected factors that shape how our experiences of game environments are enacted⁴⁶.

RGS-IBG Conference 2018: Reprogramming Landscapes of Play: Navigation and Narrative in Geocaching

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Below is the written component of the paper I presented in the Landscapes of Digital Games session – which I also co-convened – at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Annual International Conference on 31^st August 2018. The superscript numbers in the text indicate the number of the corresponding slide you should view in the embedded Powerpoint above (you can access the slides separately as a PDF here).

I’d like to thank Emma Fraser and Nick Rush-Cooper for their efforts in organising this session with me, particularly as someone who had not convened a conference session before. I’m also grateful to the Digital Geographies Working Group for sponsoring Landscapes of Digital Games, alongside an impressive number of other sessions on digital themes throughout the conference. Lastly, I want to thank my fellow presenters in this session, Umran Ali, Thijs van den Berg and Peter Nelson. As convenors we were thrilled not only with the quality of the papers, but how well they spoke to each other throughout the session. I hope the discussions we had can continue as our own individual work develops.        

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How¹ are digital technologies affecting the ways we interact with landscapes playfully? By² extending playful practices into the realms of computer software and the internet, we’ve already seen in this session the range of virtual environments designed to enable fun and meaningful experiences in video games. Yet playful³ expression isn’t somehow abandoning the corporeal in its use of interfaces such as screens, keyboards and controllers. Through their location-aware, communicative and mobile capabilities, digital media are hybridising everyday physical environments by cultivating interactive practices of information sharing, community building and, ultimately, play.

Pervasive games are those whose gameplay extends⁴ into the corporeal world; expanding Huizinga’s notion of the magic circle of play spatially – beyond a delimited arena; temporally – beyond specific time limits; and socially – beyond a designated group of players. While video games are designed with a range of possible interactions and interpretations in mind, pervasive games use digital technology to channel the physical properties, affective intensities and contingencies of already-existing landscapes to generate the conditions for players to have “positively affective” experiences, to quote James Ash.

Today⁵, I’m going to explore how landscapes are articulated in the playing of pervasive games. I’ll be contending that landscapes are not the product of a directed relationship between subject and object, but an emergent experience constituted in part by the affordances of digital technologies, but in interaction with an array of material, social and embodied agents that assemble contingently, in situ.

To make⁶ this argument, I’ll be discussing Geocaching, a popular pervasive treasure hunting game, played worldwide using GPS. The game relies on players hiding containers called ‘caches’ in physical environments, and putting their coordinates online. Using a GPS-enabled mobile device, other players can then travel to the given coordinates to search for the cache. Each⁷ cache contains a logbook, which is signed by every player who has managed to find the cache; and finds are also logged on the individual page for each cache on the Geocaching.com website, where players can describe their experiences in greater detail.

As an example⁸ of how increasingly prevalent digital technology is incorporated into everyday life through play, I became interested in how Geocaching articulated the idea of subject-object relationships central to the concept of landscape. In what ways are landscapes imagined, represented, performed and contested through the game’s practices?

My research into Geocaching started as a small coursework project during my MA, in which⁹ I carried out ethnographic fieldwork over a week in the city of Canterbury in Kent. This involved not only downloading and playing the game myself, but also looking at online descriptions of caches on the Geocaching website, and reading logs people had written for geocaches they’d found. I’ve since continued playing, finding 362 geocaches in total to date; and I’ll be using Geocaching as platform for my practice-based PhD project on place-based storytelling. The material I’ll be presenting today is informed both by the initial MA research, and my subsequent experiences as a player since.

To elaborate¹⁰ on the conception of landscape as an emergent, intersubjective experience, I’m going to delve into the two main components of the Geocaching gameplay experience. Firstly, I’ll discuss navigating to geocaches as a process of attunement with the landscape; and then frame engaging with the narratives of the cache location as a situated performance of a ‘geocacher’ role.

The¹¹ game of Geocaching is structured around a particular form of imagination: the pursuit of what is hidden or ‘secret’ within everyday spaces, and also those ‘secret’ spaces lying beyond the bounds of the everyday. Yet, in the search for landscapes that are ‘off the map’, the gameplay raises questions about what’s ‘on the map’ – and ultimately, the boundaries between the visible and invisible, known and unknown, appreciated and unappreciated in imaginations and representations of everyday landscapes.

From¹² my initial research, carried out in my home city of Canterbury, I became distinctly aware of these boundaries when navigating to caches located along both my usual routes through the city, and parts of my home city I wouldn’t otherwise go. The very first cache I found was located in a car park less than 200 metres from my regular route into town, yet I’d never travelled there before nor knew of its existence. In the hunt for a secret, my cognitive map of the city had been expanded to include a location and information that I wasn’t aware of previously.

However¹³, even in places I knew, searching for caches reconfigured the boundaries between visible and invisible, particularly for caches that were hidden in plain sight. The two pictured here were both clearly exposed, yet being hidden above and below eye-level respectively meant they weren’t rendered visible until I navigated using the GPS compass on the Geocaching app. Equally, until that day, my relationship with these spaces had only been to pass through to somewhere else; yet in this case the game demanded purposeful interaction with their material features, to search for a hidden container. Taking part in this gameplay meant that I payed closer attention to mundane details in the environment, which I would otherwise likely ignore.

Together¹⁴, the technology, game design and bodily senses of the player converge when Geocaching to enact what Maja Klausen calls the ‘player gaze’ – the cognitive work of interpreting, evaluating and making connections between things one perceives during the play experience. The way this gaze is performed by players develops over time. Through repeated practice, I typically find caches much quicker now compared to when I started, and have observed¹⁵ other experienced geocachers referring to this phenomenon as their ‘geosenses’ or ‘cacher’s eye’. This can involve recognising signs of disturbed ground, understanding the sensitivity of the Geocaching app’s GPS compass, and keeping in mind common hiding techniques (such as magnetic caches, or those wedged into crevices of trees). Geocaching here involves a process of teleplastic attunement whereby technology and gameplay combine to reorient bodily senses, fostering a player gaze that re-programmes imaginations of landscapes by rendering the ‘strange familiar’ and the ‘familiar strange’.

In particular¹⁶, what makes the design of Geocaching’s gameplay distinct from other pervasive games is how the limitations of GPS are themselves adopted to enable players to attune with their surroundings. While reaching the given coordinates will bring the player within close proximity of the geocache, GPS technology itself is only accurate within a 10-metre radius, and is degraded further by physical factors such as tree cover. Yet rather than fostering a detachment from the corporeal game environment, these affordances force you to look up from your device and interact with the physical environment to find the hidden container, intensifying the player’s relationship with the corporeal landscape. In turn¹⁷, other players have the agency to hide geocaches and engage with the materiality of their locations in creative or elaborate ways, such as those shown here. A geocache’s coordinates are there for anyone to see; it’s by engaging with the unique¹⁸ materialities of cache locations that geocachers become gatekeepers to “intimate spatial knowledge” (to quote Bradley Garrett) and the “empowering and exciting” attunement with the landscape that entails.

Nonetheless¹⁹, it’s important to note the unevenness in the ability of players to adopt such affectively powerful practices of navigation. As well as the immediate requirement for participants to own and be able to use a GPS-enabled mobile device, many geocaches are only locatable for premium members at geocaching.com, which costs £25 a year for a renewable membership. On the official Geocaching app, free membership only provides access to traditional caches, limiting the kinds of gameplay in which these members can participate. As such, the division between visible and invisible, and accessibility of the game landscape’s affective potential, is entwined with a ‘digital divide’ at the level of the individual geocacher.

By apprehending²⁰ navigation to geocaches as an intersubjective process of attunement, we can see that the affordances of each gameplay component – the technology, materials, and the player’s own bodily and social capacities – all interact over time to shape the affective qualities of the player’s journey through the game environment. But how are these affective intensities articulated by players when they reach cache sites, where the performative acts of retrieving and signing logbooks engage with a palimpsest of past and present narratives of play?                                

In the search²¹ for hidden treasure in physical landscapes, players must negotiate the evental happenings of the locations in which they are Geocaching. The player’s experience of the landscape is conditioned by their agency as a participant in both the “situated multiplicity” of the physical environment during play, and its broader narrative tissue, represented by the geocache log and the stories of those who have signed it.

As Geocaching²² takes place in public spaces that both players and non-players can access, passersby inevitably become “requisites and stakeholders in the game”. Referred to by players as ‘muggles’, passersby present challenges to successful participation in the game: specifically, the risk of them unknowingly discovering and misplacing or stealing the cache. To avoid such occurrences, geocachers must perform acts of “stealth” to avoid the attention that abnormal behaviour might attract from muggles.

In one²³ busy urban location in Canterbury, the importance of “stealth” became apparent to me when looking for a cache hidden on the underside of a bench beside a pub, where numerous onlookers sat outside. Rather than abandoning the cache, I devised a tactic of using my body as a shield to block the view of the muggles, followed by the socially acceptable act of bending down to pick up a pen I’d ‘accidentally’ dropped beforehand. These actions very much felt part of a “secret society narrative”, whereby my willing suspension of disbelief in the reality of the game – performed through symbolic acts of stealth – enhanced the play experience. Rather than being a hindrance, the affective intensity of the location, personified in the presence of people and their social norms, could be channelled in playful ways to perform new stories of engagement with the urban landscape.

Not all Geocaching²⁴ attempts transpire this smoothly. Indeed, aside from the risk of ruining other players’ enjoyment through negligence, behaviours that conflict with social conventions have triggered, for example, legal action and security alerts. The physicality of the human body itself is a site of contestation in this regard, as presence in public space, as well as participation in the community, may interact with wider norms linked to race, gender and (dis)ability. As a white, able-bodied male, I didn’t notice any barriers to access based on these embodied factors alone.

Yet my participation²⁵ has been restricted in other ways; most notably in one circumstance where I was unable to reach a cache hidden high up a tree. After climbing about three quarters of the way up the trunk without seeing the cache, I knew it must have been placed higher. Yet even climbing that far in windy conditions was a nerve-wracking experience. Had I attempted to climb higher, I recognised that I’d couldn’t have made three points of contact on the trunk, which contravened the social standards of climbing safety I’d once learnt. By abandoning my retrieval of the cache, my experience was characterised by situated articulations of material conditions, social norms and bodily capacities which were not simply playful or serendipitous, but actively restrictive.

The first²⁶ thing I did following my failure was to write a ‘Did Not Find’ or ‘DNF’ log on the cache’s virtual page, complete with a description of my attempts. By signing the log physically if the cache is found, and online regardless, geocachers mark their visits to cache sites and build a repertoire of ‘found caches’ on their profile at Geocaching.com. Yet logging has two additional purposes. The first is to share anecdotes and information with fellow geocachers, such as how difficult the cache was to find, if there were muggles around, or if any interesting events occurred. This form of logging can resemble a psychogeographical “story-stacking” process, where each new inscription of presence nurtures an “ecology of narratives” that is mapped and broadcasted through the game’s digital technologies. More than this, though, logs such as mine – especially DNFs – can signal any problems to cache owners, such as caches that require maintenance or are potentially missing. The act of logging is a situated performance of the geocacher role – to ensure the narrative context of the game landscape remains intact for other geocachers to participate in themselves.

Still²⁷, if you look at any geocache logs online, most comments are no more than a couple of sentences, and many are simply a few words or abbreviations such as ‘TFTC’ (thanks for the cache). At the same time, the interface of the Geocaching website and app don’t do much to encourage players to engage with what people have written on the cache page. Logs are simply listed in chronological order, requiring a lot of scrolling to read those further back. Together, the technology exhibited in the design of the website and app, and the social customs of cache design and logging exhibited by the community, delimit the capacities of geocachers to interact meaningfully with the stories that make landscapes significant to people.

In performing²⁸ the acts of stealth, logging and maintenance that embody the more interpretive aspects of the landscape ‘experience’ in Geocaching, the potential for geocachers to engage mindfully with the narratives of geocache sites manifests in situ. The information-sharing and communicative capacities of the game’s technology, materials and community are articulated by individual geocachers with distinct bodily and social capacities.

When²⁹ we consider the concept of landscape itself, which apprehends space through ideas of subject-object relations, we can discern a conception here that’s far more distributed than a directed relationship between singular human subject and physical landscape. If we refer back to the notion of the ‘player gaze’ and how it manifests as a process of attunement, we can see that it involves a continuous constructing and undoing of connections between the different technological, material, social and embodied elements encountered during play. The player’s not a gazing subject, but rather is performing a “perceptual actualisation of landscape and self, of materialities and sensibilities”, whereby their navigation and emplotment of the environment unfolds contingently and over time.

It’s here that I’m recognising the value of post-phenomenology as a framework for apprehending digital game landscapes, as a theoretical approach that emphasises the mutual influence of material objects and human subjects in the construction of experience. Both incidentally and over time, we can distinguish the agency of non-human elements in Geocaching in reorienting the player’s sensory and emotional perception, and in turn how players act situationally to perform narratives of engagement with the enveloping landscape. Here, digital technologies are not a medium or lens, but have agency on us, other material objects, and each other. Their affordances are co-conspirators in the stories that unfold as Geocaching practices are performed.

Geocaching³⁰ is a particularly apt example for examining interactions between human and non-human entities in landscapes of play as, despite technically being a ‘digital game’, much of the gameplay seems to occur without the use of digital devices. In his ethnographic work on the everyday realities of digital technology, Mike Duggan describes how the ‘digital’ element is often not apparent during community-oriented practices of Geocaching such as logging; yet without the technological architecture of the gameplay, the broader emotional experience of the game would never come to fruition.

Looking ahead to possible future research, these observations signal the importance of further insight into the ways digital technology is experienced in everyday life, such that we can develop more nuanced understandings of how landscapes unfold, which avoid the pitfalls of technological determinism, social constructionism, or focusing on a singular thinking human subject. For geographical research into digital games specifically, there’s ample opportunity for deeper study into the processes through which game landscapes come into being, from the early stages of design, programming and testing, through to the end-user experience and wider social and cultural impact.

I’m hoping³¹ that my upcoming practice-based PhD project can lead to some salient insights into all these stages of development, as I’ll be adapting the gameplay of Geocaching to attempt to create new methods of engaging with the stories that make landscapes meaningful to people.

Pokémon Go and Pervasive Games

When I try explaining to people my interest in pervasive games, I’ve found that my most common starting point has become “You know, like Pokémon Go, but…”

It’s fascinating how, since only last summer, Pokémon Go has effectively come to define a whole genre of games that merge the physical and in-game worlds – a genre that has existed for at least two decades. Digital technology has seen numerous transformations in this period, including the opening of GPS for civilian use in 2000, and the development of smartphones with high-speed mobile broadband from the end of the last decade. As these technologies have become more accessible, brought together in singular devices and now adopted to satisfy popular culture, pervasive games have evolved from niche, experimental art projects to a mainstream leisure activity.

I myself am a regular player of Pokémon Go, having continued playing after the initial surge of excitement in the summer. I still load up the game each day to catch Pokémon, obtain items from Pokéstops, and try to hatch Pokémon eggs as I walk. During this time I’ve had lots of opportunity to think about how Pokémon Go sits within this wider context of pervasive games.

Here, I want to focus particularly on what Pokémon Go does well and could do better with the current technology; and what we can learn about the potential of pervasive games from different examples of how digital technology has been used for playful purposes.

 

What are pervasive games?

Traditionally, playing games has entailed demarcating spaces, times and people to which the norms of everyday life are temporarily suspended, and the game rules dictate action. Participants enter these zones voluntarily, and agree on a range of activities – which may seem abnormal, socially unacceptable or pointless in real life – that are interpreted as playful and given new meaning in the context of the game. Johann Huizinga referred to this phenomenon as a magic circle – a separate world within the ‘real world’ that created new opportunities for imagination and stimulation through play, without being unnecessarily restricted by existing social norms and behaviours.

The distinctive quality of pervasive games is how they expand the magic circle to incorporate elements of real life. This expansion can be:

Spatial: Not geographically limited to spaces such as the playing field, the board or the games console. The game space can be very large (e.g. worldwide) or confined to a small area, and integrates the real-world environment in which people play.

Temporal: Not confined to certain times/time limits. The game can be ongoing – always in progress and with no envisaged end point – or can occur over long timescales such as weeks, months and years. Players often fit the game around other events in their lives.

Social: Not limited to a defined set of willing participants. Not only may players come and go from the game, but bystanders may be unwittingly implicated in the game’s activities. Players may be uncertain as to who is playing and who isn’t.                

Pervasive games therefore embrace the real-world context (spaces, times and social life) in which the activity takes place, while also re-interpreting it through the rules of the game, giving everyday things new meaning or relevance. Rather than marking out a separate realm for imagination, then, pervasive games can enable players to engage with the already-existing world in a critical and creative way, re-enchanting ordinary aspects of everyday life.              

 

Engaging with place

My main issue with Pokémon Go is that it misses out on much of this creative potential, because the gameplay’s interaction with the real world is largely superficial. When playing, I’m not engaging with the distinct and diverse features of the place I’m walking through. Instead, this complexity is flattened; reduced to cursory characteristics such as the presence of landmarks – notably, not their (hi)stories – distance walked, and locations where Pokémon spawn. I learn little about the qualities that make the places I visit unique and interesting. In fact I’m discouraged from looking up from my phone at all, in case I miss a Pokémon.

The result is that I have effectively the same level of engagement as when I play a Pokémon game on a games console, in which I can also visit landmarks, walk my eggs and find Pokémon. This is because I’m still mostly reliant on a world represented on-screen to be engaged. The only significant difference is that I can get exercise and fresh air as I walk around, which is positive for health purposes but not for creating innovative experiences.

One potential positive is that, by bringing me outside and encouraging me to walk around, the game gives me the option to explore places further if I want to. But this choice is largely independent of the game itself. Nothing about the game's design makes me want to look away from the screen and interact more mindfully with the environment. The desire to explore has to come totally from me.

An example of a pervasive game that provokes deeper interaction between the player and their physical environment is Geocaching. Geocaching is a GPS-led treasure-hunting game where players hide containers (‘caches’) in public places, sharing their coordinates and hints online so other players can look for them. Once found, players mark their discovery by signing logbooks located both inside the containers and online.

Here, the technology only takes players so far. Once players are in the vicinity of the cache, they must look away from their screens and use their senses to investigate the smallest details of the site; physically interacting with the environment to uncover the hidden container. Meanwhile, each cache has an online description that describes interesting details about its location, often including historical context, wildlife, things to see and do nearby, or personal stories that the cache owner wants to share about the place. On the same webpage, geocachers can share their own experiences of the location during the search for the cache. The virtual and physical components of the game together enable participants to interact with places in an insightful and exciting way.  

So while the technology in Geocaching is used to reveal what is remarkable about the place, the opposite is true in Pokémon Go, where basic details about the place are crudely extracted and mapped onto the player’s smartphone screen to coordinate the gameplay.

 

The limits of technology

Indeed, the technology is everything in Pokémon Go. When that fails or isn’t running, the game fails – it is unplayable. Yet in Geocaching it is the unreliability of the GPS itself, which varies depending on the device and quality of the satellite connection, that makes the treasure hunt a more thorough, challenging and ultimately rewarding task. The game acknowledges the limits of the technology and uses them to foster a more mindful and sensual interaction with the physical environment.

Blast Theory’s work has taken the idea of addressing technology’s limitations a step further, using the medium of pervasive games to explore what digital media can and can’t offer us for interacting with places and other people. In Uncle Roy All Around You – one of the early examples of pervasive games back in 2003 – individual ‘street players’ are given handheld computers that show maps and instructions from Uncle Roy, which they must use to find his office located somewhere in the city.  At the same time, online players at computer screens are shown a virtual representation of the street players’ surroundings, and can help to direct them to Uncle Roy’s office by sending them messages. Once the street player has found the office, both players are invited to participate in a further act of trust – would they be willing to make a year-long commitment to be there for a stranger in a moment of crisis? If a player agrees, they are paired with another consenting player and their contact details are shared.

The dual online and physical components of the gameplay juxtapose the immediate, detached characteristics of computer-based interaction with the complex, messy world of real-life places and relationships. Online players are unable to account for the range of obstacles and events that street players could encounter as they navigate the vibrant urban landscape, such as traffic and other pedestrians. Moreover, simply sending anonymous messages is a far cry from providing the emotional support needed to help someone in a crisis. Yet by interrogating these boundaries of interaction in the game, Blast Theory managed to enlist over 250 pairs of players to commit to being there for each other over the period of a whole year.

It was the hybridity of the experience in Uncle Roy – the uncertain attempts to traverse the real and the virtual through communication technology – that gave players the opportunity to think critically about trust, support, and the boundaries between reality and fiction in a society increasingly mediated by online relationships and digital representations of the self. Whereas in Pokémon Go, the experience is so subservient to the smartphone that thoughtful engagement with these boundaries is dwarfed by the absorbing on-screen gameplay.

Pokémon Go could learn from a variety of mixed-reality artworks produced in the last two decades, including audiowalks (e.g. The Missing Voice; LINKED) and oral history projects (e.g. [murmur]), which have demonstrated how careful balance between virtual and physical components enables each element to reveal something extraordinary about the other. The title of another Blast Theory work – A Machine to See With – encapsulates this idea of a widened perspective on social relationships and narratives, rather than a vision narrowed to the space of the smartphone screen.

 

Community building and innovation

To Pokémon Go’s credit, however, the format of the game has had some intriguing and mostly positive effects for building community. Many who have played the game will be familiar with the experience of spotting, and even making conversation with, other players of the game when in locations that host Pokéstops and Gyms. For a while in the summer it felt like the game had completely revolutionised public interactions, as an array of landmarks and spawn sites for rare Pokémon became hubs of player activity.

The more long-lasting impact, however, has been the establishment of online groups of Pokémon Go players within local areas. Although these groups are independent of the game, it is the game’s reliance on information sharing – to help players discover previously unfound Pokémon – that has encouraged players to talk to each other, share anecdotes and even meet up in real life to socialise. Being a member of one such group has taken me to places I wouldn’t have gone otherwise in search of rare Pokémon, leading to some memorable days out with my sister and five-year-old nephew. This certainly represents a social expansion of the magic circle; one that is creative of new relationships between people and the places they visit.

The game’s extensive social influence has meant that, unlike any other example, Pokémon Go has led to unprecedented awareness and interest in pervasive games. For me, this has been Pokémon Go’s most important intervention. The game’s popularity has hopefully enabled those in the creative industries to consider digital, mobile and locative technologies more seriously as tools for crafting innovative interactive experiences.

The reason why I’m particularly keen to draw attention to past examples of pervasive games is to enable prospective artists and developers to appreciate the creative potential of the medium, rather than just attempting to copy Pokémon Go’s formula or applying it to other franchises, which no doubt could also be lucrative. There is already talk about developing a Harry Potter Go game – a prospect that has excited many fans of the series, and will have left plenty in the games industry seeing dollar signs.

But as mobile digital technologies and our relationships with them continue to evolve, it would be more beneficial to see developers experimenting with pervasive games, exploring the range of human experiences they can and can’t offer. For playful art gives us unique opportunities to test different configurations of virtual and physical activity in an engaging way, as our everyday lives are increasingly distributed between the two.

Let’s use these lessons from Pokémon Go as a step forward in the pursuit of this ambition.

 

Further reading

This very useful summary of what pervasive games are. If you look on the same blog, you’ll also find some interesting discussions on the design and safety of pervasive games.

An excellent academic paper about Geocaching and re-enchanting the city by Maja Klausen, which also talks about the expansion of the magic circle.

This insightful article written when Pokémon Go was first released by Professor Steve Benford (who has collaborated with Blast Theory on a number of projects) on the wider context and issues around pervasive games.

Geocaching: Playful Navigation in Everyday Spaces

If you knew that there were secret worlds within our everyday, mundane surroundings, would you search for them?

Aided by a smartphone or other GPS-enabled device, this is essentially what geocaching asks you to do. In an outdoor treasure-hunting game played across the world, over 2.8 million containers are waiting to be found, the coordinates to their whereabouts posted online alongside hints and other information.

Inside these containers called ‘caches’ – whose size varies from ‘nanocaches’ less than a centimetre long to large boxes – you’ll find a logbook to record your visit, alongside any items left by previous geocachers, which you can trade for an item of your own. Inscribed with the traces of past visitors, the physical logbooks correspond to virtual logbooks at geocaching.com, where people tell the personal stories that accompany their successful or unsuccessful attempts to find the caches.

As these stories attest, the most valuable thing about geocaching isn’t even finding the ‘treasure’ – it is the journey you take to get there. Geocaching is a different way of navigating space. Through the format of a treasure-hunting game, and the use of mediating technology, it ultimately makes us care more about our surroundings. Both learning about places and actively creating new memories there, you become both witness to and participant within the drama of everyday life.

This post will share some of my thoughts and experiences when undertaking geocaching over the past two months.

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Re-programming the landscape

From the moment you load up the geocaching app or website, and see the waypoints of geocaches appear on the digital map of your local area, you enter into a new form of navigation. In the search for hidden treasure, the game takes you not only to places you wouldn’t go normally, but crucially enables you to see places you do visit regularly in a new light.

It’s surprising how rarely we wander off a small set of ‘usual’ routes in our daily lives. For me, this tends to be the walk to the train station, the walk through town to the public library, the train route I take up to London for university, the walk from the tube station to campus. But even deviating the slightest amount from these paths can lead you to vastly different experiences than those you would have on an average day. In some cases, these deviations can radically alter your perception of place.

Canterbury is a place I am very familiar with, having lived in the area my whole life, gone to school there, and now as a place I travel to nearly every day. Yet several times in the last couple of months, when geocaching away from my usual routes, I’ve encountered places I never even knew existed. The best example I can think of is my discovery of the world’s smallest chapel (according to the Guinness Book of Records) in the Hales Place area of the city. How had I never come across this before?

My perception of Canterbury changed perhaps most significantly, though, when on the trail of a cache in the Westgate Gardens. It’s a place I’ve walked through plenty of times before. But when I moved slightly off the beaten path, I came across a sign that marked the very spot where the London Gate – one of the old Roman gates that dotted the old city wall – used to stand. Through this gate ran Watling Street, the Roman road linking Dover and London that passed through Canterbury. All that remains now are two stones that mark either side of the old gate. The rest is up to your imagination – to try to visualise a road running through what is now a grassy, walled garden bisected by the River Stour. By seeking the geocache in a spot previously unknown to me, I’d become newly aware of the geography of Roman Canterbury, and how it corresponds to the present city.

However, not all of the geocaches I’ve found are in previously unvisited locations. Many have been in spots I walk past fairly regularly, which means I’ve had to abandon my usual, uncritical way of moving through these places and adopt the ‘geo-sense’ needed to find the caches. This typically involves being more sensitive to the details of your surroundings, including looking closer at objects in the vicinity; feeling around in places that aren’t exposed to the eye; or thinking carefully about the ‘hint’ given in the geocache description, and how it might relate to the place you’re searching.

For example, the cache pictured below is quite exposed as it juts out of a hole in a tree. But because the hole is just above eye level, and the cache is camouflaged, it took about 20 minutes of thorough searching to find.

Here are some more caches that required heightened awareness to find.

A microcache hidden on the back of a lamppost:

A cache hidden in a drawer built into a footbridge:

A magnetic cache hidden on the back of a railing:

All of these caches were in places I knew well. It was only through geocaching’s playful form of navigation that these ‘ordinary’ places became extraordinary, and my perception of these places was transformed. This is partly why Maja Klausen writes in her fantastic article that geocaching ‘re-enchants’ the city.

Of course, as you might expect when using digital technology, navigating in geocaching isn’t without its problems. The one I’ve encountered most often is poor mobile data signal, which prevents you from opening cache descriptions on the geocaching app. There is nothing more frustrating than wasting time pacing around to find a spot with good enough signal.

The GPS can also be troublesome due to its lack of precision at times. In the hunt for a ‘multi-cache’ at St. Martin’s Church in Canterbury, I had to gather numerical information from multiple gravestones in the graveyard, using it to complete the coordinates of the final cache location. However, because the gravestones were so close together, it became difficult to pinpoint exactly where I should be looking when using the app’s GPS compass. This made the search much more time-consuming than I expected.

The final technological issue was the life of my phone battery. I usually make sure it’s fully charged if I know I’m going to be geocaching for a long time. But because of the combination of using the app, mobile data, location settings and higher screen brightness when outside, geocaching can be a particularly sapping activity for batteries as well as legs.

So, when I say that geocaching ‘re-programmes’ the landscape, I mean to say that the new perspective it affords is dependent on a nexus of technologies that aren’t always reliable. Nonetheless, the playful navigation that this technology facilitates is one that can redraw your mental maps and reorganise the perception of your surroundings, transforming the environment into a game – something fun, challenging, and contingent – but ultimately more meaningful.

 

The secret society

While this game is now enjoyed by over 10 million players worldwide, geocaching is still an unknown quantity for the vast majority of people. When they walk outside, they almost certainly won’t be thinking that there are hidden objects in their surroundings. They’ll be occupied by the more mundane tasks of everyday life. As such – rather appropriately, in my view – geocachers call non-players ‘muggles’, after the term for non-magical beings in the Harry Potter universe.

However, even though muggles are unaware of the game, they still have a stake in it. If a muggle unknowingly discovers a cache – which can and does happen – there is a risk that it will be misplaced, damaged or stolen (‘muggled’). It’s also possible that the abnormal behaviour of players, both in hiding containers and searching for them in public spaces, will arouse suspicion and lead to security alerts and/or legal issues. This creates an additional challenge for players to negotiate, which requires care during both stages of the game: hiding and seeking.

During the hiding stage, geocachers must try to ensure that the cache can only found by those looking for it. This is especially the case in urban areas, where larger numbers of passersby make it difficult to be discreet. As a result, many geocachers have turned to increasingly elaborate ways of hiding caches, which have the additional benefit of providing a more interesting and fun play experience.

Although I’ve found many caches that are cleverly hidden (some of which you’ve already seen), my favourite example of an elaborate cache is one I found in Canterbury in April. After about 20 minutes of searching, I finally found a camouflaged flask which I thought was the cache. As it turned out, this was only half of it. Inside the flask was a set of keys, with instructions to press an electronic buzzer that was also included in the flask. When I pressed the buzzer, I heard a birdcall sound that led me to a fake birdbox attached to a tree. Using the keys to unlock the birdbox, the bottom opened out to reveal the final logbook for me to sign.

These kinds of caches are always the best to find, leaving you with a mixture of satisfaction, after the effort needed to find the cache; and admiration, at the effort and creativity of the cache owner to create such a fun experience.

Creativity is also often deployed when seeking geocaches. This is because geocachers have to somehow avoid drawing the attention of muggles, which unsurprisingly can be difficult when you are crawling head-first into a bush, for example (this actually happened). On the whole, using public spaces for anything other than moving from one place to another, or buying/consuming something, tends to come across as somewhat abnormal – hence why it is very easy to spot tourists when they stand still and look up wide-eyed at old buildings. To evade this kind of attention, geocachers therefore have to perform acts of ‘stealth’ as they search for caches.

I was caught in a particularly tricky predicament in April when geocaching by a pub in Canterbury. Because the weather was so nice, there were quite a few onlookers who were sitting at tables outside the pub. I knew that the cache was hidden on the underside of the bench I was sitting on, but I struggled to find a way to look for it without drawing attention to myself.

After briefly considering abandoning my attempt, I managed to devise a tactic where I bent down to pick up a pen I’d ‘accidentally’ dropped beforehand, using the opportunity to swiftly grab the small magnetic box attached underneath. Of course, I also had to be discreet when replacing the cache, after I’d signed the logbook. This time, I used what I call the ‘body-shield’ tactic – putting yourself in between the onlooker and the cache location. I got up from the bench and stood on the other side to block the view of the muggles, and then pretended to be looking for something in my bag as I nonchalantly slipped the cache back into position.

As you might imagine, it certainly feels like you’re playing the role of a ‘secret agent’ at times when geocaching. As part of this ‘secret society’, it is your responsibility to protect its secrets from those who could ruin the magic. This can be challenging, because in an outdoor, real-world environment filled with real people, there is always the potential for unexpected and unpredictable situations to occur. However, it is also this unpredictability that makes geocaching a continually enchanting and enjoyable experience for geocachers, as they improvise and adapt to their surroundings – whether that is by creating a fake ‘CCTV in operation’ sign to hide a cache in a car park, or pretending to tie your shoelaces when searching for a cache at ground-level. As Bradley Garrett writes about urban exploration, it is by becoming a gatekeeper to such “intimate spatial knowledge” that participants experience moments that are “empowering and exciting”.                          

 

A benevolent community

While acts of secrecy and intimacy are essential for creating these powerful experiences, they wouldn’t be possible in the first place without the commitment of the geocaching community to share interesting places, and their stories, with other people.

When geocachers decide on a place to hide a cache, they nearly always think carefully about why their particular spot is worth bringing people to. This could be a site with an interesting history; an area of natural beauty; or even somewhere to which the cache owner has a strong personal attachment. When the cache is approved and published online, this information is then often shared in the cache description alongside coordinates.

Reading these descriptions can give you a whole new level of understanding about the place you’re in. Before finding a cache hidden near the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, I read its description to discover a wealth of history about the theatre and its site that I’d never known about before. It turns out that the location where the current theatre stands used to be an Odeon cinema until 1984, when it was converted into the Marlowe’s second building. Its first building was demolished just before, and is where the current Marlowe Arcade shopping area now lies. Simply by reading this description that the owner made the effort to write – because they took an interest in the site – this interest was passed on to me, and I became newly aware of the history behind multiple areas of my city.

It’s not simply factual knowledge that gets passed on, though. In the description for a cache hidden in the Spring Lane area of Canterbury, the cache owner poignantly revealed that “this is near my old school which sadly closed down”. He was referring to Chaucer Technology School, a secondary school located a stone’s throw away from my own secondary school, whose sounds of lunchtime life I heard in the distance during my search for the cache.

As I walked past the old school, I thought about the stories of everyone who attended it over the decades – how this now abandoned site played such a formative part in the lives of so many people. I also pondered nostalgically about my own time at secondary school, as its sounds continued to echo through the streets. Through the sharing of stories and personal connections, geocaching immerses you in the narrative tissue of neighbourhoods, uncovering the emotional attachments that people form with places.

Alongside the cache descriptions, stories are also shared in the logs that people write after searching for caches. Although the physical logbooks in the cache containers usually only record the dates and names of finders, geocachers also write virtual logs on the online pages for each cache. In these virtual logs, it is customary for geocachers to tell short anecdotes from their time spent seeking the cache. Accounts typically include descriptions of the journey taken to the cache, muggle activity, the length of time spent searching, and ending with a thanks to the cache owner for the experience. Taken altogether, by inscribing your presence in a place through the act of logging, geocachers take part in a process of ‘story-stacking’ that ultimately fosters a shared interest in places amongst the geocaching community.

Logging also enables the geocaching community to sustain itself in a more practical sense, through the monitoring and maintenance of caches. In the event that a geocacher does not find a cache, they can write a different kind of log called a ‘Did Not Find’ (‘DNF’). If a cache owner sees that there are a number of successive DNF logs on their cache, they might suspect that their cache is missing or has been ‘muggled’, and can therefore make the decision to give it a check-up and replace it if necessary.

Occasionally, caches are still in place but need some kind of maintenance. From my experience, this is most commonly due to logbooks being full or damaged – therefore preventing other users from signing it – or damage to the cache container itself. As you can see from the pictures below, in two recent cases the logbooks I found were waterlogged.

For the first example, I wrote a ‘Needs Maintenance’ log on the cache page, including pictures of the saturated logbook. Explaining the situation, I also suggested to the cache owner that logbooks should be kept in a waterproof bag to prevent any moisture from causing damage.

In the second case I was geocaching with my Dad, who happened to have some spare paper in his car. We put the old logbook at the bottom of the container, covered it in a bit of plastic bag, and put the new paper inside a waterproof bag, making sure it was properly fastened.

Both of these kinds of actions are common in geocaching, and illustrate how the community is largely self-sustaining. It is almost totally through the motivation of fellow geocachers to share interesting places and fun experiences with other people that the game can continue. Whether it is through revealing historical facts, telling personal stories or physically maintaining caches, the geocaching community is benevolent because it is bound by a shared concern: encouraging people to care about the places they live in.

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As you can probably tell, the world of geocaching is one in which I’ve thoroughly immersed myself over the past couple of months. But this exciting, secretive realm isn’t a different world – it is our world. It is the one we live in every day. The magic is hidden in the mundane, if you know how to look for it.

Unfortunately, access isn’t equal. I’ve indulged myself with a premium geocaching membership over the last two months, which has cost me £4.63 per month (although it is much less - £2.08/month - if you decide to buy an annual membership). As soon as I upgraded, a multitude of premium-only caches appeared on my geocaching map. As a premium member, I also have access to more services on the geocaching app and website. The free service is great for newcomers who want to try it out, but I’d find it hard to let go of my membership now.

Clearly, geocaching isn’t an unproblematic activity. The technology can be inaccurate and poor network coverage can be a hindrance. Muggles can be difficult to avoid, especially in cities. Walking around can be tiring (but good exercise). The weather can be terrible. And some caches can be extremely hard to find.

Yet it is this contingency that keeps you wanting to explore, because every single experience is different. Geocaching takes the diversity, unpredictability and uniqueness of the places we live in and turns it into a game – something we want to participate in, learn about, and enjoy.