Analysing Video Game Research: Making a Path

Coding my dissertation data

Way back in the middle of July, I finally completed the fieldwork for my dissertation exploring the environments of walking simulator video games. Armed with data gathered from interviewing 11 game developers, playing 12 games, and a wealth of secondary sources, I somehow had to make a path towards fulfilling my research aim. This was to understand the extent to which virtual video game environments can be experienced as places – spaces we come to know through the human meanings and feelings we associate with them.

I had a great deal of data to work with, but unfortunately not a lot of time. My fieldwork finished later than originally planned, due mainly to a couple of game developers having to postpone interviews because of their own commitments. Although this couldn’t be avoided, I knew I would have to make up the time by being efficient with my analysis. After all, the final deadline for submitting my dissertation wasn’t moving, and soon enough I would need to get words on paper.

I had already transcribed all of the recordings from my interviews and typed up my handwritten research diary to make the data as accessible as possible. To make it valuable for my research, though, I needed to somehow translate these texts into key themes and points that have something interesting to say for the questions I’m asking as a researcher. In qualitative research, this process is known as coding.

The only way to get started is to dive straight into the data. I started off by reading everything as closely as possible, noting down details that came across as significant in the context of my research aims, the rest of the data set, and prior reading on the subject. Creating a list of these topics as they were encountered, I’d then underline each one once for each new instance of that topic in the transcripts and research diary entries I read. By the time I’d read through the ~200 pages of data, I was left with 5 sides of topics, underlined to different degrees, with lines between them to show their connection to other topics.

So what do we learn from this early stage of coding? Well, already we can begin to see which observations were more or less prevalent during the research, simply by looking at the number of lines underneath each topic. We can also start to assess how different topics fit together by looking at the network of lines going between them on the list. It was a messy document, but within it were the foundations for the series of points I would go on to make in my dissertation.

To make a coherent argument in a piece of academic work, though, you can’t simply reel off a list of points. These points need to be placed within a framework that guides the reader towards understanding how they contribute to a wider discussion of the subject matter. In dissertations, each chapter usually provides a pivot for the discussion, so the path you make through the material often becomes a question of how you organise this chapter structure.

For subjects with lots of interconnecting factors, as are typical in human geography, themes are normally the best way to approach the research subject, which have distinct characteristics but also fluid boundaries that are able to flow into each other freely. This is the approach I took to the complex array of topics that my dissertation presented, condensing my various data into groups of ideas that provided the basis for my dissertation chapters.

I can’t claim to have any particular words of wisdom for identifying themes, especially for this project. It’s like alchemy. You collect together your thoughts and magically new patterns begin to emerge, and everything starts making sense. It’s as if your subconscious has been slowly weaving and winding the different bits of information throughout the research, and only by thinking deeply can you access this strange fabric that connects everything together. Like Sherlock’s ‘mind palace’ that he uses to thread evidence together until he reaches a moment of insight.

It started at the tired end of a busy day when I was considering getting an early night. I started to look through the list of topics I’d made, when suddenly things started to click. I picked out one key theme, then another appeared, and eventually two more to form a group of four themes that each nicely divided the range of points I’d identified during the initial coding stage. These themes stayed effectively the same right the way through the analysis and writing stages, and were as follows:

Agency and interactivity: relating to lack of mechanical interactions in walking simulator games (i.e. button pressing, complex and precise controls), and instead the loose interactive framework that designers use to encourage players to explore the game world mindfully.

Immersion and believability: how the game worlds feel authentic and visceral, as if you are really experiencing them – but also how they fail to do this.

Navigation and narrative: how game developers design powerful experiences in worlds, and the ways players navigate these to form stories as they explore.

Emotion and subjectivity: how game worlds are designed to make players connect emotionally with them, and how players’ own identities become part of the world itself through this process.

Once these four themes were solidified, it was time for the highlighter pens – probably the most important tool for coding analysis. Using four different colours, I turned back to my list of topics and highlighted each one according to the theme(s) they were associated with. By the time I was finished, I was left with a document that not only told me the most prevalent topics and how they joined together, but also where they would ultimately fit into the chapters of my dissertation text.

My dissertation was taking shape.

The final stage of my analysis was one I’d never properly done before in any research project, but turned out to be the best course of action I could have taken. I was lucky enough to have a fantastic, enthusiastic supervisor for my dissertation, and he gave me a gold nugget of advice for the final phase before writing. He suggested writing abstracts for each chapter – short summaries of around 200 words or less – that clearly set out exactly what I was arguing for each one. This helps you to tie together all the points in each theme to make a coherent argument for the chapter; taking the reader on a determined, purposeful journey towards conclusion, rather than a sprawled collection of ideas that prevent clear understanding. Furthermore, by knowing exactly what you want to say in each chapter, it helps you to decide how you’ll order them so that the reader’s journey is logical, flowing from one argument to the next.

For my abstracts, I went deeper and further than my supervisor suggested. For each chapter, I also wrote down three key pivots of the argument, which formed the chapter’s subsections. This then helped me to categorise the different pieces of data I’d gathered more precisely to save time. At the larger scale, I also decided to write a rough abstract for the whole dissertation. In the end, a dissertation is marked as a single text, and therefore it has to read well as such. It’s by having a consistent line of reasoning flowing through the chapters that the reader will get a strong impression of your research findings, and their place and impact within the field.

There needs to be a clear take-home message, otherwise the research will be wasted no matter how well it was completed.

Like the winding paths of the walking simulator games I played, my analysis was also about treading a path through a world of ideas, objects and feelings, and threading them together to make a story – a series of events that the reader must encounter to eventually reach conclusion. Hopefully this post has revealed how you can transform a big bunch of wordy data into a story, but also how this can be done concisely, wasting as little time as possible.

If writing an academic text is about taking the reader on a journey, then good analysis gives you efficient tools to break through the unknown and make a path towards understanding.

In the Virtual 'Field': Playing Video Games for Research

To understand how the environments of video games work, you need immerse yourself and play in them – that is their purpose. However, you might be wondering how something seemingly so indulgent as playing a video game could ever be considered ‘research’.

Yet immersing oneself in a different culture to learn about how it works habitually, at the level of practice and individual action, has been a valid research technique for a long time. It’s called ethnography, and is perhaps most famous for being used by social scientists of the past, who spent years living amongst tribal communities in the Global South. The principle is the same – you need to be immersed, and to some extent participating, in a culture and its practices to effectively understand them.

In this case, though, rather than observing other people/cultures, I’m observing myself – my actions, what I observe, hear, feel and think – as I play video games that I own. This is called autoethnography.

Ultimately, this method had to produce data that I can analyse and use to form an understanding and argument about how video game environments create a sense of place. I needed ways of capturing my actions, observations, thoughts and feelings accurately and in a usable format.

There were three main techniques I used to do this.

Firstly, there’s my research diary. After a gaming session, I take time to reflect upon my experiences and gather my thoughts. Then, usually later in the day, I write down detailed notes in my research diary based on my collected thoughts. As this is a reflective process, I can take time to consider both the game as a whole, as well as individual moments within it, in relation to the questions guiding my research.

Pages from my research diary

However, only writing about my experiences after playing the game might not capture the more instantaneous feelings I have during play, which are important for understanding how the game environments are affecting me. These experiences are often difficult to convey through writing, because when you write your brain is heavily processing and manipulating the bodily information it receives. Although you can certainly argue that it is impossible to ever comprehend basic feelings without manipulating them in some way, I’ve attempted to get closer to the ‘raw’ experience by using voice recording.

Using the arrangement pictured below, I set up a condenser microphone and voice recording software to record myself as I play the games. The advantage of this approach is that I capture my immediate reactions to all the small, incidental events within the game that might be forgotten later on when I write the research diary. This often includes sudden, pre-cognitive responses to the environment, such as wonder, fear and surprise, which are potentially as important to the experience as my longer-term impressions of the game.

My voice recording setup when playing games for research

The last main technique I use to record experiences is taking screenshots while playing the game. Visual evidence is excellent to have, not only as reminder to myself of the things I have witnessed, but for the dissertation itself, so I can point towards concrete examples of different design techniques and things I’ve encountered in the game environments. Images are also potentially better at capturing things like ambience, mood and symbolism than I could express in writing or through voice recording. I can then consider these factors in the analysis, alongside the diary and recording data.

Symbolism from the cave in Dear Esther

Visual evidence from The Stanley Parable

A cache box in Firewatch

Hand-written postcard in Gone Home

These methods aren’t flawless, and this is something I’ll be talking about in my dissertation.

Screenshots can’t be categorised and analysed as easily as text, because you can’t just do a key word search to find evidence related to a specific theme.

Constantly speaking and taking screenshots while playing can be a distraction from what is actually happening in the game, therefore altering the experience you have of the environment.

The voice recordings are lengthy, so will take a long time to analyse.

And all of these different data – especially gameplay recordings and screenshots – require large amounts of storage space on a PC, and therefore also take longer to back up to the cloud or an external storage device.

Nonetheless, I’ve been gathering a comprehensive and mixed set of data that will be valuable and interesting to analyse. They also complement each other very well for my research aims, as I’ll be able to compare and contrast what I observe in the screenshots/diary/recordings with the data from the interviews/talks with game developers.

I therefore hope that this original combination of research methods can potentially advance the field to improve future research in cultural geography, and on the subject of video games in particular.

The research I’ve done so far has been incredibly insightful, and although the analysis and eventual write-up is going to be hard work, I’m looking forward to seeing what can be learnt from this very unique body of work.

I’ll write again about the analysis stage in a month’s time.

In the Virtual 'Field': Interviewing

My decision to do interviews – alongside playing video games themselves – was a very specific one. Through these methods, I’m aiming to get insight both into how the game environments are conceived and designed (through talking to their designers), but also how they are experienced when played (through playing them myself), and how the two inter-relate.

As such, my research isn’t as solely focused on the interviews as my undergraduate dissertation, when I did 31. This time I’m only doing around 10. But they still need to be rigorous, to get the most useful information as concisely as possible. The interviews are also my main way of communicating with people in the games industry, so I want to try and build good relationships with the developers to raise the status of my research. If done right, research can be as influential for industry as industry is for research.

Thanks to my extensive experience in conducting interviews, I’ve developed an effective process for preparing and carrying out interviews. I’ll talk through some elements of this now.

Preparation and interview schedules

Preparation is crucial, because to get valuable responses you need to ask good questions, and also create a strong rapport with the interviewee. The key element is the interview schedule, a document which sets out a plan for how the interview will be structured.

This isn’t meant to be rulebook, though. I’m doing semi-structured interviews, which means that although I’m guiding the conversation, I’m leaving plenty of room for the interviewee to talk about what matters to them. After all, because I’m not a game designer myself and do not know all the ins and outs of making a game environment, I’d probably miss out on a great deal of important information by simply going through a set list of questions directed by me, with little room for elaboration.

Instead, my interview schedules are thematic. I don’t want the interview to be a completely unstructured conversation, otherwise there’s a greater risk that I won’t get any answers to my research questions. So instead I write down some themes that I want to cover, with ideas of questions I could ask based on my research questions and prior knowledge of the topic. Then, as the conversation flows, I can choose appropriate moments to respond and dig deeper into what the interviewee is saying specifically, or ask a question from a relevant theme in my schedule to guide the conversation a little more towards my research purposes.

It’s a bit of give and take – a conversation with a purpose. 

Like the emails I initially send to contacts, the schedule themes/questions are tailored to the individual interviewee, based on prior knowledge about their specific game(s), any previous talks/articles/interviews they’ve done on the topic, and anything we’ve talked about before the interview in person or via email. Sometimes I might want to dig deeper into something they’ve mentioned before; other times I might identify something relevant that they haven’t talked about. Some of the questions I’ve asked to other interviewees are repeated, if they’re appropriate, and worked well before. Overall, as you learn more with each interview, and encounter different people, the interview schedule is also adapted.

Skype interviews

Let’s talk about the interviews themselves. As all of my interviewees live far away from Kent, and are all busy with upcoming projects, every interview has so far been on Skype. Skype interviews actually have a lot of advantages over face-to-face interviews. They’re easy to record at high quality, using free call recording software from the internet (check out Amolto Call Recorder), which removes a lot of the worries of hurriedly noting down everything. The recordings also tend to be clearer because they usually take place in quiet surroundings with both speakers close to the microphone, unlike face-to-face interviews which often take place in more public spaces, with background noise and awkward seating arrangements.

You can also choose whether to use video or not. Video allows you to see and interpret the body language of the interviewee, and communicate more directly. Audio-only, however, means that you can concentrate more on what the interviewee is saying, less conscious of your own body language and surroundings.

The day of the interview

On the day of the interview, a sensible routine is good practice. If it’s early, I make sure I set plenty of alarms and give myself comfortably enough time to get ready in the morning. I have a sort of mental checklist of things I do – make sure the interview schedule is printed off and laid out in front of me; make sure I have paper and a pen ready; make sure I’m online on Skype at least 5 minutes before the start time, with the call recording software running; make sure I have a drink nearby and have eaten; put up post-it notes of anything specific that I want to remember; and ensure that my laptop is in a good position for the webcam and microphone.

My standard Skype interview setup

It can sometimes be a bit nerve-wracking before interviews, particularly when you are talking to people with any kind of status. My first interview for this project was with one of my absolute heroes of game design who knows a lot about the topic, and having also not interviewed for quite a long time, I was somewhat nervous. Once you get into a rhythm, though, it’s fine. It’s all about easing yourself and the interviewee into the conversation.

The interviews themselves have gone really well so far. I can already sense how much my interview technique has improved since my undergraduate research.

I’m better at picking up on details of what the interviewee is saying, and then using them in subsequent questions to dig deeper and find out more about what they’re thinking.

I’m generally better at framing my questions in a way that gets the interviewee to talk at length about what they feel is relevant – using question structures such as ‘Tell me about…’, ‘What do you think about..’, etc.

I’ve also improved how I manage the flow of the conversations, starting with simple and broader questions, and then following the different trains of thought to reach the important, useful details.

And lastly, I have a much better sense of when the interview should stop. In the past, I’ve asked more questions than I needed to, simply because I assumed I would get more relevant information. But longer interviews take more time to transcribe, and answers aren’t always as informative when you and the interviewee lose momentum.

Transcription

Transcription is the final step before analysis. This is the often painstaking process of typing up each interview word for word, so that what was said can be analysed easier. It can be very lengthy, depending on the speed you type, the quality of the recording, and how fast the interviewee speaks. 1 hour of recording will typically take 5 - 7 hours to transcribe. 

However, you also don't always need to copy every single word that is said. For example, the initial greetings and small talk you make with the interviewee, or if the interviewee decides to go off on a tangent that is definitely not relevant to what you're talking about. It can happen.

For this project, I’ve learnt from past mistakes and made sure to transcribe my interviews as soon as possible after doing them. Doing this means that what was said is still fresh in your mind, and ultimately allows you to analyse the interview sooner.

There are other benefits to thorough transcription, though. As well as giving you greater familiarity with your data, which helps with analysis, it can also help you improve your interview technique. Every now and then I’ll listen to something I’ve said during an interview and cringe, realising how I could have phrased it much better, or notice a detail that I should have asked more about. I can then learn from these errors in the next interview.

_________________________________

All in all, I’ve immensely enjoyed the interviews so far. I’ve always loved this part of researching, because it is such a pleasure and a privilege to meet new and interesting people, and learn from their unique viewpoints on topics that I also find interesting. I’m very grateful to all the game developers I’ve spoken to so far, and thank them for their time.

In the Virtual 'Field': Laying the Groundwork

For any long-term research project like a dissertation, it can be difficult to know precisely when the fieldwork starts. Because even when you’ve planned a discrete period of time for gathering data, there are important steps you need to take beforehand that allow you to make the most of your time in the field. This can include background reading on the topic and methods, getting equipment, finding secondary sources to put your research in context, contacting people, and more.

For me, the last two in this list were crucial.

The work began straight after a couple of big coursework deadlines around March/April. As part of the London Games Festival in April, there were two big events that caught my eye. One was a talk at the BFI in London on The Art of Video Games by the two creative heads of The Chinese Room, an indie games company renowned for developing walking simulator games. The other was the Eurogamer Expo (EGX) Rezzed event, also in London, where there were multiple talks by relevant designers of this genre of games, as well as the opportunity to network with more people in the industry and find up-and-coming games suited to my research.

Tobacco Dock, the stage for EGX Rezzed 2016

Playing games for GamesAid at EGX

I can’t emphasise highly enough how much it helps to make these connections early. Making contact with as many relevant people as you can, and getting as much background information as possible, is a great way to avoid wasting time during your planned fieldwork dates. To be honest, adding more workload to my schedule was the last thing I wanted to do in April, with two big coursework deadlines looming at the beginning of May. But by taking initiative and putting in that extra work, I’ve been reaping the rewards by being able to jump quickly into the fieldwork proper from late May onwards.

After my coursework deadlines in May, I got straight on with contacting game developers for interviews, many off the back of the prior contact I’d made. So far, I’ve had a response rate of roughly 50%, which is much higher than you’ll hear quoted as the expected rate in any text on soliciting interviewees (~10%). This is how.

I’m fortunate that my undergraduate dissertation gave me some fantastic experience in this regard, for which I did 31 interviews. All of these required prior contact. So over time, I’ve developed a successful technique for emailing potential interviewees and getting them to respond.

Firstly, creating a good interview briefing sheet is a must. This sheet must give a neat, clear summary of what your research is about, why you are contacting the person, and what they can expect from the interview process. The next stage is adding the logo of the university/institution you are representing, alongside contact information, which gives you a sense of credibility and trustworthiness. The last parts are mainly stylistic. I like to add a photo of myself – the same as that which is on most of my internet accounts – so that they know everything’s legit. You also tailor the text to the particular audience. In this case I’ve been contacting video game developers, who are typically fun-loving, easy-going, informal, and not necessarily knowledgeable about academia. Therefore, the tone I’ve adopted gives the impression that I’m mainly just a nice guy who wants to have a fun, interesting chat about video games.

Secondly, you need to write good personalised emails to send along with the briefing sheets, which are a bit like what a cover letter is to a CV. This is where you address the particular person you are contacting, asking if they would be willing to be interviewed. The most essential thing here is research and background information, so that you can appeal to that person’s unique character, interests and knowledge. Google searches and following people on social media are great, and for me it was also important to demonstrate my knowledge of their games/other work too. This is also the right time to mention any personal connections or recommendations – for example, if you’ve spoken to the person before (as I had with some developers at games events), or if other people had recommended speaking to them. All in all, this should give the person the impression that you know your stuff, are enthusiastic about the subject and are committed to your research, which all increase the likelihood of replies.

You may be wondering how I managed to get the contact information for the interviewees in the first place. Fortunately, because game developers are artists making a product for public sale, they nearly always have websites with email addresses that are publicly available for people to contact. Occasionally the email addresses are for the whole development team, which can be annoying if you’re looking to contact a specific person. In this case, I found their email addresses elsewhere on the internet, including at the end of public talks that could be watched online. Also, if you know the format of the company’s email addresses, you can make an educated guess. Typically it’s [first name]@[company name].com.

Overall, the lesson here is that putting more effort at the stages before fieldwork will be beneficial in the long run. Taking the time to do your homework and think carefully about how you approach people is always better than a scattergun approach, where you simply spam every relevant person you can find with a generic email, because the latter gives the impression that you don’t care as much. People actually really enjoy talking about themselves and topics that they find interesting – all you have to do is cultivate that interest and enthusiasm by showing your own.

In the Virtual 'Field': Researching Video Games

The opening scene of Dear Esther, perhaps the 'original' walking simulator game

Now that all the coursework for my Masters is finished, I’ve been engrossed in independent research for my dissertation, which is due at the end of August.

My research is about video games.

Video games are increasingly popular and influential cultural products. The video game industry is now worth $99.6 billion globally – which is more than books, music and cinema respectively – and is growing at 8.5% each year. The diversity and innovation that this industry is now producing has rightfully bolstered the status of games as ‘art’. More than ever, they are deserving of in-depth research. But compared to other cultural products, research is significantly lacking.

My dissertation is looking at the environments of video games. In particular, I’m focusing on a type called ‘walking simulator’ or ‘exploration’ games. What sets these titles apart is how players interact with the game, where many traditional game mechanics are avoided (e.g. shooting/fighting, counting scores, winning/losing, player death, character customisation). Instead, these games engage players and tell stories mainly by providing a rich environment for the player to explore.

Like in real places, these virtual environments have a rich sense of place because they are the setting for a body of information and meanings – sights, sounds, memories, emotions, histories, symbols, and so on – that are unique to that site. Unlike in many traditional games, in which their setting is simply a backdrop for the actions the game wants you to perform, walking simulators are based on the idea that the stories and emotional power present in well-designed, immersive game environments alone can give the player a (potentially more) engaging experience.

What fascinates me is the way that virtual environments can enable such deeply affecting experiences, given that they are literally made up of computer code, manipulated through the minds and actions of their designers and players.

To understand how this happens, my research has three main questions at its core:

- What spatial techniques do designers use to construct a sense of place in video games?

- What agency do players have in the designed game world? What is the power relationship between designers and players in experiences of the game world?

- How is the player’s own identity brought into the world of the video game?

Like all geographers undertaking primary research, I’m doing fieldwork to find the answer to these questions. Though, as you might imagine with a topic like video games, my ‘field’ isn’t the traditional grassy wetland on a rainy day. It is more of a virtual one.

In three posts over the next three days, I’ll be talking about the methods I’ve used to gather data in this unconventional ‘field’. These include laying the groundwork for my research by attending game events, listening to talks by game designers, and making contact with people in the industry; interviewing award-winning, internationally-recognised game developers; and, perhaps most excitingly, a novel technique of playing video games and recording my experiences.

I’m ultimately hoping that my research can break new ground in the knowledge and study of video games, and give rise to some new threads of thinking within geography and other humanities/social sciences.

Over the next three days I’ll explain how.

_____________________________________

You can read the research proposal I wrote for my dissertation here.

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.

______________________

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.

_______________________

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.