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Geoguessr: Geography lessons in the real world

Published by marco on

I’ve recently discovered (via Kottke.org) a deceptively simple game called GeoGuessr, which works as follows:

  1. The game shows a random location using Google Streetview
  2. The player has to click as close as possible to the location on the inset map
  3. The game rates your guess based on distance from the actual location and comes up with a score (6500 points seems to be the maximum)
  4. Repeat 5 times
  5. Tally up the score

Depending on how you play, you may or may not care about the score. Kottke at the link above writes that “Using Google in another tab is cheating!” If you play that way, the score will help you figure out how well you guessed. However, the game is—in my humble opinion—much, much better if you look up the location in another Google Maps instance.

How can that be? Why, because it’s just really not that easy at all, even if you “cheat”.

 Everything's in Cyrillic. Good luck!Some of the locations drop you into the middle of a vast desert with no signs of human habitation. Some of them will be in locations where you don’t know the alphabet or writing system. You’ll have your fingers crossed that the country you’re lost in uses Arabic numerals for its roads or perhaps at least includes an anglicized version of its city names in major highway signs.

And count your lucky stars if you at least get into a modern StreetView; there’s still data for the States and Australia that dates back to 2009, which is of quite low quality. Try reading a street or highway sign in those places.

We got 32368 points on this one (try it yourself), nailing the location within a few dozen meters in most cases. If you don’t fee like trying it, you can just view the locations.

Highlight the next paragraph if you want to see the locations.

Our locations were in Omsk, Làrach Mòr (Scotland), Esashi, Japan, the middle of nowhere in Australia (Tambo) and northeast of Johannesburg in South Africa.

If you’re going to try it, don’t read the next paragraph either.

 No landmarks at all. Enjoy! How do you even search this on a US keyboard?We would find landmarks on signs like “Dirk’s Place” or “Club Hotel Motel” and “Fanny Mae’s Food and Fuel” or the “Top Tucker Great Grog” which we found on Flickr and pointed us toward Tambo in Australia. For Omsk, we used an online Cyrillic keyboard to enter street names in Russian (we had to search around since “Pushkin Street” was as likely to narrow things down as “Elm Street” would in America). In another case, we relatively quickly recognized that we were in Japan, but had to cruise the streets until we saw signs with Arabic numbers and Latin alphabet city names to narrow things down. Without extra help, we would have still missed our guess by hundreds of kilometers, if only because we have no idea where highway 115 is in Japan without looking it up.

It turns out that the version of the game in which you “cheat” takes a lot longer than the one where you just guess as best as possible without looking up anything. We tried again (try it yourself) and managed to best our previous score by a paltry few points (32386 points this time), but also noticed that the game was whisking us off to almost the same countries as in our previous attempt. If you don’t feel like playing it, you can still view the locations we visited.

Again, highlight the next paragraph if you want to see the locations we visited.

This time, we were transported to just outside Kiev, along the coast in Brazil, south of São Paolo, near Shimoda, Japan, west of Lesotho in South Africa and a small, rural town in Romania.