Side quests in real life

What makes a good side quest

Three things separate a side quest from a to-do item. It has a clear finish: you either found the honor box or you didn't. It takes you slightly off your usual path, even if only one street over. And it is pointless in the best sense. Nothing in your life depends on it, so there's no way to fail badly.

It helps to decide the quest before you step outside. A quest chosen halfway through a walk tends to get bent to fit whatever you were already doing.

Ten-minute side quests

For the gap between two meetings, the walk to the store, or the last of the daylight.

1. Find a red thing on the way Pick a color before you leave and don't stop until you've spotted a door, a bench or a car that is mostly that color. Change the color tomorrow.
2. Bench to bench Walk from one bench to the next one you can see, then the next. Stop when there's no bench in sight.
3. A letter in a thing Find an object whose shape is a letter of the alphabet: the L of a lamppost, the E of a railing. Collect your initials over a week.
4. Phone in pocket Walk a mile without taking your phone out. It's longer than it sounds.
5. The most worn thing Within a hundred yards, find the object most worn down by people: a step hollowed by feet, a handrail polished bright, a button rubbed shiny.
6. Twice the same Find two objects side by side that are almost, but not quite, identical, and photograph the difference.
7. The honor box Look for an unattended farm stand with a cash box for the money. If there is one within reach, buy whatever's on offer.

Side quests for an afternoon

These need an hour or two and a pair of shoes you don't mind walking in.

1. Don't come back the same way Walk a couple of kilometers and finish somewhere other than where you began. Take the bus back, or make it a loop you've never closed before.
2. Visit a tree you know Pick one specific tree, one you could point to on a map, and walk to it and back. It's a destination like any other.
3. The long way there Walk somewhere you would normally drive. Three kilometers is a good size for this; the point is noticing what the windshield usually hides.
4. Bring something back Return with something you didn't set out with: a flat stone, a leaflet, a receipt from a store you've never been inside.
5. Where the road stops Find a street or path that simply ends, and go and stand at the end of it.
6. Follow the water Choose a stream, a canal or a shoreline and keep it on one side of you for five kilometers.

Side quests with a clock

Some quests are about when, not where. These only count if you're outside at the right time.

1. Before the day starts Be outdoors between six and eight in the morning, and walk a kilometer before you eat anything.
2. The afternoon gap Get out between three and five, the hours most people spend indoors waiting for the day to end.
3. Catch the sunset from higher up Find a raised spot in time for sunset. Note where the sun went down and check again in a month; it will have moved.
4. Ninety minutes, six kilometers Stay out and moving for an hour and a half. Distance is secondary; the time outside is the quest.

Keeping score

Most people who do this keep a log: a notebook, a note on the phone, a spreadsheet with a date column and a done column. Some add a rarity to each quest, common to legendary, so that the hard ones feel earned. A streak count helps too, for a while.

The weak point of a self-kept log is obvious. Nobody checks. If you write down that you walked to the tree, you walked to the tree. That's fine as long as you're honest with yourself, and it stops working the first week you're not.

Is there a quest app for real life?

Yes. There are random side quest generators online, which are fun for a day, and there is RLQuest, which was built around the checking problem. Every morning it hands you three to ten quests from a library of more than 2,700, chosen to fit your age, your interests, the weather, the season and the time you've said you have. Swap any quest you don't like.

The part that matters: the app verifies what it can. A distance quest is checked against the recorded route, a tile quest against the new hexagons on your map, a photo quest by looking at the photo (a picture of a red door has to contain a red door), an evening quest by the clock. Where a quest can't be checked, the app says so instead of pretending. Some quests lead to real places, castles, lighthouses, viewpoints and old city gates pulled from OpenStreetMap, and being the first person in RLQuest to complete one there counts as a first find.

RLQuest is free to download for iPhone and Android, and a Premium subscription adds more quests per day. It's an app rather than a website on purpose: without your route, a step counter and a camera, it would be back to taking your word for it.