When it comes to Adventure Labs, I was a late adopter. I didn’t complete my first one until 2022. But boy, did it change the game for me, and not in ways I could have expected.
I nearly lost my sh*t the first time I completed an AL and realized I had earned not 1 but 5 smileys! What was this going to do to my stats? How was I going to know which find # a find was (my logs all end with “Find #9999, TFTF!”)?? Milestones???
There are voices in the geocaching community who are saying that Geocaching and Adventure Lab statistics should not be integrated for these reasons, but let me expand a bit:
Recently, a new geo-art started forming in the YYJ area. “I ❤️ Victoria BC” is planned to consist of a total of 124 Adventure Labs, each with 5 locations. This would be absolutely fantastic if the Labs actually took Adventurers to places in Victoria! A grand tour of the city, her history, her culture, her geography, dare I say her secrets? But that’s not what we are getting here.
In all 124 labs, the five locations are the same five spots at the cruise ship terminal. Each one has a softball multiple choice question, many of which have the answers in the description and all the rest of which can be answered with quick Googles.
One could sail into Victoria aboard the Zaandam, pull out one’s phone, and have a 620 find day without ever leaving the pool deck. A local could drive up and park on Dallas Road and do the same. I know this, I have been to the same spot on Dallas, just outside the Breakwater District, four times now since the geoart started forming, to unlock the locations as the labs are published. It’s going to take me all summer to complete. And that’s with legitimately taking an Adventure Lab device within the physical geofence of the lab locations – in the geoart, that geofence has a 500 metre radius! You can actually park fairly deep into James Bay (Macdonald Park is in range) and complete the labs from your car, not even in sight of Ogden Point. And once, again, that’s with legitimate, unspoofed GPS.
GPS spoofing, however, compounds the statistical issues by another dimension.
We know that fake location utilities for mobile devices exist and have been shown to work with the Adventure Lab app, at least until recently. PC-based Android emulators with built in location spoofing are harder for apps to detect so location spoofing still happens. It is also known that this is exploited by some “cachers” who have five-digit find counts but 90 or 95 percent or more of them are Adventure Labs in places the user has never actually been to! How can we know who has actually accomplished giant caching milestones and who armchaired their way there with BlueStacks?
Our glorious 124 lab geoart would be a tiny snack for the spoofers.
Yes, it’s just a game but let’s not lose sight of the fact that we have exactly one official yardstick with which to compare our achievements: the total find count that appears after your handle everywhere on geocaching.com. What’s the point of playing if someone who isn’t really playing “wins”?
Little wonder then that a movement to divorce Adventure Lab statistics from geocaching is growing.
My position is this: Yes, Adventure Lab and Geocaching stats should separate. But since the damage is already done and milestones are already impacted, any such separation should preserve Lab “finds” prior to divorce day as geocaching stats. As an IT person, I know this is a pretty big data management challenge, which is why I suspect HQ has already had this conversation and not gone ahead.
My fear is this: Separating Adventure Labs from geocaching will likely kill Adventure Labs, as a prime motivator to find Labs evaporates.
A possible compromise: Divorce the stats as the movement asks. Whatever happens to Labs happens. Re-introduce Virtuals and Webcams as available options, perhaps with restrictions that they didn’t have before they were grandfathered. These could fill the role of Adventure Labs in getting cachers to go places, without having to sign a physical log.
Here’s some discussions. There are a lot of different perspectives on this issue, and most of them are worth considering:
Geocaching Forums: Adventure Labs are Killing Geocaching
This one hits on the exact topic of this post: