GPS Games People Play

I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and as usual I have Jonathan Strickland, one of our senior writers with me. Hi. Oh, I'm sorry it was a bit lost lost. Perhaps you need a way to find yourself. As you can tell, this is one of our corny segues directly into the podcast topic, which today is all about GPS and the

games you get to play with them. You know, I don't have a GPS, so I've never experience ends this, but I think it's fascinating that you would take something as I don't know, utilitarian as a GPS device and find a way to play a game with it. Right, Yeah, and well, I'll talk a little bit about the history of GPS and and and kind of how it works.

Kind of explain how this came about. I mean, the fascinating thing about it is it started out as a military thing, right, technically cut story, that was a science fiction thing. But so an you put it that way, I just hey, you know, Arthur C. Clark gotta give them props. So um so. Global Positioning System or GPS, this is a system that utilizes a kind of location

um system called three dimensional trilateration. All right, that's a fancy way of saying that you determine where your position is honest sphere by measuring the distance between you and a saddle and several satellites. Usually it's at least three satellites, if not more. And by measuring the distance between yourself and the satellite, you can figure out where you are in pretty specific terms upon that sphere, the sphere of

course being Earth. Kind of funny how that works, right, So yeah, so you're you're you know, it's kind of like triangulation, but it's again called trilateration. And uh, the way you measure your distance from the satellite is that your your GPS receiver sends a signal up and then receives a signal back from the satellite. It determines how long it took the signal to go out and back, and that tells it how far away it is from

the satellite. But because of course the signal is always going to travel at the same speed, right, So by doing this multiple times with multiple satellites, you can determine your position on the Earth. Um, there's more in there that we could talk about. I mean, there's some really cool science behind it because obviously a satellite orbiting the Earth, it's traveling at a very fast speed as it orbits,

which means relativity comes into play. You can't just put a regular clock on a satellite and expected to stay sinked to your clock on Earth. You have to figure in relativity. That's cool, do you think it is? And it's also cool that it can tell where you are from tens of thousands of miles in space because it has to stay out at that distance in order to keep it SNUS exactly. Yeah, so it's really pretty fascinating. It's pretty cool stuff. So anyway, that's technically how the

GPS works. It's measuring those distances and then determining your location. You take a look and most GPS systems now they have a map function where it just it shows your location on the map, and as you move around your your movements are reflected in that map you can see. But early GPS systems often what they would do is give you coordinates and tell you where you were based. You know, you'd have to use coordinates and then refer

to a physical map to determine where you were. And early in the life of GPS systems, it was, as Chris mentioned, a military application, and so as a military application, the government didn't really want citizens being able to use this with any sort of real precision. That's why they used selective availability. Yeah, but that's mostly been revoked. At one point it was but um ten meters or something

like that. Yeah, what would happen. What would happen is the government created these algorithms that would insert artificial errors into the signal so that people using a civilian GPS system would never be able to tell for sure if the coordinates they received were accurately reflecting where they they were standing and it was you know, you the closest you could determine is around three hundred feet. That was about as about as close as you could figure out

that you would be um. You know, you can never be sure. It could be further than that, even depending on the errors that were inserted into the signal. But in two thousand, the u S revoked this, this policy of selective availability, and then it became possible to determine your position within you know, six to twenty ft accuracy. And now it's pretty good. It's pretty pretty accurate, which gave rise to the ability to play games using your GPS.

And you know, we're not talking football here, We're we're talking about well and it's almost like hide and seek in some ways. Yeah, or treasure hunting is a treasure of looking at it. Um. Yeah. So the biggest game that folks player, perhaps the most popular, and the biggest is probably the wrong word. Most popular game would be geo cashing. Now, geo cashing started when this uh, this

this fellow out and I believe it was California. As soon as selective availability was as soon as that was dismissed, He's like, Hey, I have this cool idea. I'll go out into the woods. I'll hide a box out there with a little prize in it, and I will um, I will mark the location. I'll figure out where I'll carry GPS is a receiver with me. I will fig write down the coordinates for the box. I'll go back, upload the coordinates to the web and challenge people to

try and find it. And I think within the first couple of days someone had found it. Um. So even this early on, there were enough enthusiasts who were just waiting for this opportunity to really kind of play with these receivers they had access to, but they didn't. You know, of course, with the selective availability, they couldn't really do it.

Now that it was gone, the sky was the limit, and that gave birth to geos cashing, excuse me, And so with geo cashing, the general idea is that you create a cash or a box of some sort of container of some sort um, and you hide it in

a location. You put some stuff in it. Usually there's a log book, um, and there's often some little trinkets in there, and you, uh, what you do is you you upload the coordinates to a website for geo casher's and the geo cashers went, you know, if they're planning a trip out, they say, hey, you know, I wanted to go hiking along this trail and there are some some cashes that are along the trail. Let me see how many of them I can find while I'm out there.

They take the receiver with them, they go hiking, they look at the numbers, they try and find the cash.

If they find it, they signed the log book. They can take a trinket, and usually they leave a trinket behind, and a lot of geo cashiers have specific things they leave behind, so that way you know who's been to the box before, sort of like the Pink Panther the original movie, right, so you know, you could look down and if you see, I don't know, like a smurf, you're like, oh, Bill was here, because Bill leave smurfs.

Or maybe even maybe it wasn't Bill. Maybe it was someone who had visited one of Bill's cashes found the smurf and then they used that as the one they traded off when they found the second cash. And the games can get way more complicated than that. You can maybe get to the first cash, and when you get there, the only thing in it is our our coordinates to a second cash. Well, you have to make your way

to the next one. And the idea here is not just that your treasure hunting or walking all over the places that you're experiencing the outdoors and and ideally the Casher's hide these things in locations that are you know, beautiful or or remarkable in some way, so that the journey really is part of the enjoyment and the destination is part of the enjoyment. It's not just that you found the cash. Um. I think there's another one that's

very similar, geo dashing. Yeah, I've heard of that one too, where there's a list of way points and you have to uh, it's sort of like a rally, I guess in a way, because you have a certain spot that you're supposed to go to before you can go to the next spot, and the point is to get to as many of them as you can, I mean, try to get all of them, um. And you have to be within a hundred meters or so of each point to be able to count that you were there. So

then in fact, you're supposed to describe your experience. So I guess that you're you're proving it's like, yeah, I was at the McDonald's on Fifth and Maine, you know, uh, to say, okay, yeah, well, obviously you've been to where we were supposed you were supposed to go, you know, in the list. So that's that's kind of interesting because not only are you going to one specific point, but

you you are supposed to. It is the journey. It is going from point to point point B and then C and play different lates and you know which way is going to be the most efficient, you know. Yeah, that's that's another good game. There's a there's a similar one called geo Vexilla. Oh yeah, you heard of that one. Yeah, involves flags of the world. Yeah. Um, the thing is they're they're not really you're not. If you see like the Spanish flag, you're not supposed to go to Spain. Um,

there's a point that's represented by that. So like the McDonald's on Fifth and Maine might be the flag of Spain. But the trick is the flags disappear, so you're supposed to get to each one of them, but for they disappear and something else pops up to get credit for actually having visited that spot. So not only are there waypoints, but the way points come and go and it. Yeah,

so it really is race in that case. Yeah, you have to really pay attention to see when something pops up that you can actually make it out to and then hopefully when you make it out it's something that you you know, it's a flag that you actually needed. It's like like I've got eight Union jacks, but I need the flag of Portugal. Yeah exactly. Yeah. So that's a that's another interesting one, another race oriented. Uh geo game. Um have you heard of shutter spot? I have heard

of shutter spot? This? Uh, this is not so much a race type of thing. No, No, this one, this one's a puzzle almost. It's in a way geo cashing is is very much kind of a puzzle as well. And geo cashing, you know, you have the coordinates and then you have to find out where those you know, you have to find the location that matches those coordinates.

Shutter spot is the other way around. You. You find you're given a picture of a location and you have to see if you can find the spot the photographer first stood in when he or she took that photo, and you then upload those coordinates. Right, So if you saw a picture of say Mount Rushmore, you'd have to go to Mount Rushmore and look at it and go okay, well, obviously the photographer was not standing where I'm standing because

this is a completely different view. So I need to be you know, over to the right, or yards off to the right, or a hundred yards off to the left, and and yeah, you have to try and use you know, I have to match your view to the view of the photograph and then consult your GPS receiver and say, you know, this is where you were standing in yes or no type of thing. Yeah, that's that's pretty cool. It's kind of a reversal of some of the other games.

And and what's interesting here is that a lot of these games are based on even older games that happened before there were GPS receivers available on the consumer market. There's a game called letter boxing that is kind of the the I would say that the grandfather to geo cashing. And in letter boxing, you would use clues and and riddles and poems to try and direct people to a

specific location to find this letter box. And inside the letter box would be a log book very much like the geo cashing one, and a stamp, and every person whose letter boxing would carry their own stamp and stamp the log book and then use the log book stamp to stamp their own personal log book, so it proves that they visited and they have the record of their visit in their own log book. But again, you're not giving coordinates in this case, you're just giving clues. So

geo cashing is a little more straightforward usually. I mean you can combine the two where, for example, you follow the the coordinates that you get from whichever geo cashing website you go to, you get there, and the only thing there is a clue to something else, so you can combine the two games. There's no there's no hard

and fast rules here. The real point is to create a challenging environment and uh and and and have people have a little adventures out out outside of their normal realm of experience, which is you know, it's definitely there's something romantic about that, and there's also something really techy about that. Um I don't know about you, Chris, but I've met a lot of tech geeks who really are like the hopeless romantic type. So this really tends to

appeal to their sense of adventure. And and I mean it's just it's it's a little geeky, a little dorky maybe, But you know, I could I wouldn't mind doing it for a weekend, you know, go go on a nice little hike and see if I can find a cash. And they're everywhere. You can check out several different geo caashing websites and they're all across the world, the United

States in particular. It's it's pretty popular. Yeah, and if you're if you're thinking about doing this yourself and actual lead planting a cash, you need to uh check out. There are some sites you should look at, maybe a

geocashing dot com is one. But there are rules. You need to be very careful about where you go even while either way, when you're planting a cash or when you're going on other people's property, you need to make sure that you are aware whether you're on public or private property and basically abide by the laws because and and and the the wishes of the private property owner. If that is, if the cash is in fact on somebody's private land, because um, they may say, yeah, sure

you can. You can put a box in that old tree down there by the lake. You know, just as long as you're not leaving trash around and and people aren't coming over here and you know, stealing my stuff and making a mass and polluting and all sorts of things. You know, you want to be respectful of other people because it is in fact a game, and as soon as people abuse that, then you know, you know, everyone

can um. So there are other rules to live by, Like if you are on a Geo cash hunt, you want to be careful not to disturb the environment or or leave as little an imprint as you possibly can. So uh, you know, if you see like, you gotta keep in mind that Geo casher's tend to like to hide the box that's not just sitting out in plain view. But you want to make sure that if you're hiding it, don't hide at someplace where people are gonna have to destroy part of the environment or to get to it.

And uh, if you're hunting, keep that in mind that it should not be in a place that's gonna make you have to you know, break a tree branch or or or you know, go rooting around in the underbrush or whatever. It should be in some location that would cause the least amount of impact on the environment you are in. And uh, and keeping going back to the getting permission or checking to see what the rules are. Keep in mind that we live in a uh, a

different world than than the year of two thousand. Mean, we we live in a world now where if you were to walk down the street and see a weird box kind of shoved up behind a corner of the building, you might be a little you might be worried. And there are cases where people who were innocently we're just trying to hide a GEO cash have been mistaken for trying to hide something like a bomb. And it's you obviously don't want that to happen, so do keep that

in mind. It's it's you know, it's a fun game to you, and from your perspective, it's fine, but think of it from the person who owns the property or law enforcement. It could be something that, you know, if they're unfamiliar with it, it could be very worrisome. That's true.

That's true. And you know, thinking about it, um with the recent uh surgeon popularity of smartphones, many of which have GPS devices, and then you know, this is the kind of thing that more people could get behind simply because they'll say, I got this GPS thing and my my iPhone or my uh you know, Google Android enabled phone. I I don't really use it other than for directions.

But I've heard of this geo cashing thing here, it's possible that more people will get involved with I wouldn't be surprised to see geo cashing applications come up where you would be able to access UH data live and even be able to you know, upload your own find as soon as you find it. And I mean it's it's a perfect kind of device for that sort of application, and because it has not just the GPS capability, but

of course the phone capability or even WiFi capability. Although most of the time you're not going to find a cash and a WiFi enabled environment. No, I wouldn't. I would imagine that there are urban cashes. There are people who hide them in urban places, but those are more rare. For one thing, it's harder to get a signal in an urban environment from a GPS device um And for another,

again it tends to give law enforcement officials ulcers. Well, this was a pretty good discussion, I think on different games you can play with your GPS. But I've got another discussion we could talk quickly about about treasure hunting in general. But before we get to it, I think it's about time we think our sponsor. I mean audible dot com. Yeah, audible dot com where you can find

thousands and thousands of audio books. And if you sign up at www dot audible podcast dot com slash text stuff, you can get a free download as your first download and you can pick anything out of you know, like I said, there's like fifty thou books there now. And we have a couple of suggestions. Chris, do you want to go first? Yeah, this one I think, uh, it's very appropriate for our discussion. It's called Geography of Bliss One grump search for the Happiest Places in the World.

It was written by a correspondent for NPR, actually, Eric Winer, and he discusses different places he's been and uh, you know, places that that you might have some kind of happy experience, and it's just kind of an interesting, uh, interesting subject, especially considering the games and the GPS and finding yourself in different places. Sure, yeah, that's very much that. Yeah, yeah, a good one. Well my suggestion I figure that when you use a GPS device in this kind of way,

you're really kind of expanding your world knowledge. And there's really one true authority on all world knowledge. And I would like to recommend his book. It is The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgement. It's a book that contains everything he knows and it's all lies, which makes it much easier to write. And there are a lot of hobo's names in the book and I'm sure they would have enjoyed having. Yeah, that sort of thing that

hoboes would be all over in a minute. So you can get either of these or any other book on Audible's website by signing up at www dot audible podcast dot com slash tech stuff and remember you get that

free download. It's a great deal. So getting back to treasure hunting now, Well, what I wanted to recommend to our listeners is that if you haven't already subscribed to Stuff you Missed in History Class, which is one of our I guess a sister podcast you could call it, I highly recommend it as the lovely and intelligent hosts of Jane McGrath and Candice Gibson, and they talk all about historical UH scenarios and they answer a lot of questions. And one of the ones they did recently was a

podcast titled could Treasure Hunters have Discovered Nazi Gold? It's a very very interesting discussion that they have and uh, it really dives into politics and morals and ethics, geography. Uh, it's just a great podcast and I highly recommend it. Excellent And if you want to learn more about geocashing or GPS receivers or even letterboxing, we have all those articles uplive right now at how stuff works dot com.

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