So I’ve recently discovered another out in the real world walking game. It’s called a modern scavenger hunt and apparently it’s like geocaching, which I’ve never tried. But I have tried Ingress and Pokemon Go and while I have enjoyed both games one thing has frustrated me with both: they don’t encourage exploration. They are in essence grinding games. The game designs have you move in tight little routes, in a very slow pace, often repeating your steps. There’s no reward for going off the beaten path or exploring new eares.

But this game, Munzee, has had me crawling and exploring until I ran out of battery and tomorrow I’m gonna go out for a long walk and see what I find. The game is very simple, but with a few mechanics it makes the players act in a way I find really rewarding and interesting.

Like Ingress and Pokemon Go the main display is a map showing a lot of locations you want to seek out around you. But unlike the two other games when you reach the location you have to look for a QR code placed in the real world. It’s only when you scan this, that you capture the location and get your points.

There is also virtual locations, and a whole host of variations on the just find the QR code, such as puzzles you have to solve before you can capture the location and so on. But the basic game is: go to the marker on the map, look for the QR code using the clues in the title of the marker. The game does a few things I find really interesting:

No repeated visits = more exploration
I’m not sure about this, but it seems that when you have captured a point that’s it you can’t return and capture it again. I don’t know if after some time, I might be able to take it again or after someone else have captured it, but I kinda hope not. Because what this means is that you are encouraged to move away from your normal route to find new points to capture. Unlike Ingress where the best gameplay is to create a five mints rute between the same points until you have gotten all the resources you can from them.

So as I play this game I will have to find new places to go to get more points I will have to move further and further away from my home, I will have to take new routes home. And I love that. It also means that if you are on your way home, and you can’t be bothered to take that one point just over there itøs fine, becuase you can do it tomorrow, where in pokemon go you get help but go over there or just wait that little longer so the cooldown on the pokestop is over so you get the chance for one more spin and more pokeballs.

Finding a well hidden QR code is very rewarding
The pictures is of my favorite find today. It’s a well hidden Diamond spot, that gave me more points and was just hard enough to find that I really felt like a proper explore looking for it, and when I at last spotted it it was, well a rewarding moment. And it feels even better, knowing that it has been placed there by a fellow player it’s a strange kind of contact between strangers.

Players build the games themselves and are rewarded for it
So how do the QR codes get to their spots? Well they are placed there by the players. And as a player you are rewarded for doing that. You get points for placing a QR code and you get points each time someone captures it. So even here in little Hobro the place is full of places for me to seek out a QR codes to find and scan. There’s so many I’ve had to filter out all of them except the most basic so I don’t get overwhelmed which is cool because that means I’ve got more to look for in furete walks in the same areas.

As a final note the way I discovered the game was very much in the spirit of it: during a normal walk I spotted a QR code on a bench and decided to scan it. It turned out to be one of the spots for the game, and that lead me to the website and from there it was just signing up getting the app and beginning. And I can’t wait to play it more and soon starting to place my own spots.

What do you think?
Do any of you play it?