Outside of geocaching, achievements have been a popular way for video games to recognize milestones in games. I seek out achievements for my Xbox Live Account for the reward of seeing that icon in my profile. It tends to make me do something different in a game which ultimately makes me enjoy the game and play it more.
It seemed natural that we should try and apply the concept of achievements with geocaching, but it also made sense to come up with an idea that was relatively straightforward and could be rolled out and tested with the community. This would ensure that we didn't design a big project in a vacuum and have it turn out to be something the community doesn't like. So the idea was to release souvenirs.
Launching Souvenirs
Souvenirs are pieces of unique art that are assigned to a location. When you find a cache online, or search for a cache on one of our official Geocaching mobile applications, the system posts the location to our souvenir system and sees if there is an award to acquire. If so, it assigns a unique piece of artwork to your geocaching.com profile and marks the date it was discovered. You can then go back and review the artwork any time you choose.
Although the official launch of souvenirs to the world was on October 10, 2010, to celebrate 10 years of geocaching and Groundspeak, we had released several souvenirs on the iPhone before then. For example, I received one for the Scotland Mega event, and both the original cache location and the Project APE cache have them.
Currently souvenirs can only be created and awarded based on some very basic criteria, though we plan to expand the functionality moving forward. Today, souvenirs can only be received by visiting an area that has one, on a specific day anywhere in the world, or a specific place and timeframe.
Our design team has already created souvenirs for the 50 US states, provinces in Canada, states in Germany and souvenirs for many countries in Europe. We'll be sorting out the release schedule but they will all be applied retroactively. In addition, any other souvenirs will run against previous logs so those that deserve to be awarded the souvenir will get them. We had to hold off awarding them retroactively before we could stress test the web site with real-world activity.
Is this the solution to the return of Virtuals? Definitely not! We're still planning to bring back virtuals in a new form, but this isn't it. It's just a new unique way to take geocaching adventures "beyond the box."
