http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/06/11/second-life-geocaching/ 

Second Life Geocaching

Posted Jun 11th 2007 9:00AM by Tateru Nino
Filed under: Entertainment, Exploration, Mixed Reality

Geocaching has been around in First Life since the year 2000. This sport is essentially a treasure hunt: for a traditional cache, you use a GPS to determine the location of the cache, inside which you will find a log for recording your details, and often some small item which is of small absolute monetary value but highly prized by geocachers.

slgeocaching.com (JavaScript required) a site that deals with geocaching in Second Life; it is associated with the "Geocaching in SL" group. This group began geocaching in Second Life during this year, 2007. Obviously, in Second Life, no GPS is required, but based on my experience, there is still plenty of time spent seeking caches, particularly the difficult-to-find ones.

The website is not overly fancy in design; it is sleek and lightweight visually. Photographs add flavor to the bare text and are not spread about too liberally; they are restricted to news articles, cache information pages, and to a gallery in the corner of the page that displays player's pictures. As a registered user, you have access to all the facilities you need to play: hiding and seeking caches, logging finds, blogging experiences, forums, and statistics, both your own and those of other players. The pages for hiding caches and seeking caches are easy to use, though they take quite some time to load.

However, it is not all intuitive to use. There is not an obvious section available for new players to help them get started and understand what the sport is all about; this information is hidden away under the forums. This is a piece of information that should perhaps be available right up front on the home page, so as to entice new players; it puts people off if they have to search for information, no matter how committed they are. There are several different ways of getting at news, via the "Recent News" and "Popular lists", but there is no easy way to delve into older news, or to get a list of all news.

I decided to try out geocaching for myself. I'd read about geocaching in First Life some years previously, but had been kept out of the sport due to a lack of a GPS. "Now," I thought, "Here is my chance!"

At first I ran without the instructions on how to find a cache in Second Life (I admit, I couldn't find them). The first cache was of difficulty level "easy", was a "traditional" cache, and named "Second Life's 1st Geocache" when I arrived, the giant fish shown in the cache description was missing, and I assumed then that the cache had gone along with it. Secondly I hit the cache named "Camlann", and with a little alt-mousing found the cache. At that point I took another look at the website and located the information tucked away in the forums on how to search for caches; ironically, it was after that that I had my second and third failures in finding caches. Fortunately, when I visited the "Antovic" cache, I found it almost immediately; that was a decided relief. With that, I returned to the sites of my past failures and had another bash. This time ... success!