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My daughters were bored in a beautiful city. Then they found a riverbank, and later that afternoon I watched five adults do exactly the same thing.
Vandeth
A few years ago we went to France on holiday — my wife, my two daughters and me. We did the things you do in Orléans: the old town, the squares, the streets that everybody photographs. It is a genuinely beautiful place.
My daughters were bored inside twenty minutes. Not badly behaved — just bored, in the specific way children get bored in a city that has been arranged to be looked at. There is nothing for them to do in a place like that except walk at an adult's pace and be told things.
Then we came down to the river, and they asked to go down to the water. They stayed there for about thirty minutes. What they were doing, mostly, was picking up clam shells.
Not collecting them in any organised way. Finding them. Turning them over, comparing them, deciding some were better than others, filling their hands and showing us. Thirty minutes, no complaints, and it was the best part of the day.
Nobody designed that. The riverbank is not an attraction. It has no ticket, no opening hours, no sign explaining its significance, and no one is employed to maintain the supply of shells. What it had was things to find, and children who were allowed to find them.
Later we walked back through an alley, and I saw a small group of people — four or five of them — standing around a street sign. One was reaching round the back of it. They took something out. I never saw what it was properly; it was small enough to sit in a hand.
Then they stood there talking about it, clearly pleased, and put it back where it had been.
I am fairly sure it was a geocache. But what stopped me was not the cache. It was that these were adults, in a working alley in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, doing exactly what my daughters had been doing on the riverbank an hour earlier — and they had come to that alley on purpose to do it.
Finding beats being shown. A cathedral is shown to you; you stand in front of it and receive it. A shell you picked up yourself is yours, and you will remember the afternoon you found it long after you have forgotten which cathedral it was.
And a city can carry a second layer. That alley did not change. Nobody built anything, applied for anything or spent anything. Somebody put a small object behind a sign, and from that moment the alley had a reason to be walked down that was invisible to everyone except the people looking for it.
The obvious answer is: geocaching already exists, go and play it. I did look. Two things about it did not fit the person I had in my head — a family with a few days in a country they do not live in.
You install something and make an account before you have found a single thing. A visitor with three days will not do that, and my own daughters certainly would not have. So the way in had to be a piece of paper you point a camera at — no install, no account, a page in about a second.
A cache is a logbook you sign and put back. But my daughters did not want to log the shells. They wanted to keep them. So what you find should be yours — a small printed object that leaves in your pocket and never comes back.
Because I live here, and because the raw material is everywhere and almost none of it is arranged. Alleys, riverbanks, a courtyard behind a shopfront, a pepper farm, a temple complex people walk through in fifteen minutes because nobody gave them a reason to stay for an hour. Orléans has one riverbank. This country is mostly riverbank.
It also has a lot of people running places that visitors already come to, who would like them to stay longer, and who cannot commission an experience designer to arrange it.
It turned into two things, and both of them are that riverbank, arranged. Tokens hidden across a city with host venues holding them behind the counter — scarce, seasonal, and yours if you find one. And permanent puzzle trails at one place — a château, a museum, a pepper farm — where each station asks you something and the answers assemble into one word you take to reception.
Everything else in the system comes from that afternoon, including the parts that look like restrictions. The map will not give you a pin for something you have not found; it gives you a square about 250 metres across, because being told where a thing is is the opposite of finding it. Keep something and you write its page once and it stays that way forever, because the object is what is scarce. And the whole thing runs on a printed piece of paper, because that is what my daughters could have used without asking me for a phone.
Not downloads. There is nothing to download. Not sign-ups either — you can play the whole thing without ever making an account, which is deliberate and is not going to change.
The measure is a family standing somewhere they had not planned to be, and one of the children asking for another twenty minutes.
The best half hour of that holiday cost nothing, and nobody designed it. ROK is an attempt to design it anyway — and then to get out of the way and leave the finding to somebody else.