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Casual game rec: GeoGuessr
Jan. 19th, 2019 10:26 pmWe begin our story in 2012, when a game known as Find the Airport swept Tumblr.
There was (technically, still is) a website called MapCrunch. If you went to MapCrunch, it would display a random spot on Google Street View. You could interact with it in the normal Street View ways: move around, zoom in and out. You could, optionally, have MapCrunch not tell you where the spot was.
In Find the Airport, you set MapCrunch to anonymised-map mode, got your random spot, and attempted to navigate to an airport. (The idea being that you had awoken in an unknown location and had to make your way home.)
While Find the Airport had its good aspects and *was* possible to win (I won once, finding an airport in southern France), the mid-late game was often a long, frustrating slog. While there was always the possibility of finding a neat thing to take a screenshot of and post on your blog (and many did), the fun parts were almost all at the beginning, in which you attempted to figure out from contextual clues where MapCrunch had put you.
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Enter the successor† to Find the Airport: GeoGuessr. In GeoGuessr, you're plunked down in an anonymised bit of Google Street View, and the explicit, site-supported goal is to figure out where you are from contextual clues. When you are ready to guess, you can place a pin on a zoomable world map. The site will then give you a point score based on your pin's crow-flight distance from the actual location.
It's still up to you how much assistance you're willing to allow yourself. Personally, I find it most fun to play by a rule of "I can use everything except other Google Maps tabs". Each round is a hunt for clues, often in seemingly-innocuous things, that I can stick into a search engine or look up on Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a certain gratification in finding that you already know everything you need to know to deduce your location, but playing with assistance is part of how you learn those things you need to know.
There are a bunch of modes, competing against other players or on certain restricted maps, but I haven't tried them myself: I just stick to the classic one-player all-maps mode.
It's a fun puzzle, and a nice way to learn some neat bits of geography and explore places you might never have thought to look at otherwise. And if, like me, you enjoy the puzzle aspect of stalking people but refrain for ethical reasons, you might find this fills a similar mental niche. Bits of Google Map, after all, don't mind if you doxx them. :)
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This post brought to you by playing a game of GeoGuessr and getting within a few kilometres on all five rounds. Take that, rural Australia!
(it also helps that I'm American enough to recognise an outline of Ohio on a state-highway road sign)
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†Although I'm not sure if it was *intended* as a successor, or if it was a convergent-evolution thing.
There was (technically, still is) a website called MapCrunch. If you went to MapCrunch, it would display a random spot on Google Street View. You could interact with it in the normal Street View ways: move around, zoom in and out. You could, optionally, have MapCrunch not tell you where the spot was.
In Find the Airport, you set MapCrunch to anonymised-map mode, got your random spot, and attempted to navigate to an airport. (The idea being that you had awoken in an unknown location and had to make your way home.)
While Find the Airport had its good aspects and *was* possible to win (I won once, finding an airport in southern France), the mid-late game was often a long, frustrating slog. While there was always the possibility of finding a neat thing to take a screenshot of and post on your blog (and many did), the fun parts were almost all at the beginning, in which you attempted to figure out from contextual clues where MapCrunch had put you.
---
Enter the successor† to Find the Airport: GeoGuessr. In GeoGuessr, you're plunked down in an anonymised bit of Google Street View, and the explicit, site-supported goal is to figure out where you are from contextual clues. When you are ready to guess, you can place a pin on a zoomable world map. The site will then give you a point score based on your pin's crow-flight distance from the actual location.
It's still up to you how much assistance you're willing to allow yourself. Personally, I find it most fun to play by a rule of "I can use everything except other Google Maps tabs". Each round is a hunt for clues, often in seemingly-innocuous things, that I can stick into a search engine or look up on Wikipedia. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a certain gratification in finding that you already know everything you need to know to deduce your location, but playing with assistance is part of how you learn those things you need to know.
There are a bunch of modes, competing against other players or on certain restricted maps, but I haven't tried them myself: I just stick to the classic one-player all-maps mode.
It's a fun puzzle, and a nice way to learn some neat bits of geography and explore places you might never have thought to look at otherwise. And if, like me, you enjoy the puzzle aspect of stalking people but refrain for ethical reasons, you might find this fills a similar mental niche. Bits of Google Map, after all, don't mind if you doxx them. :)
---
This post brought to you by playing a game of GeoGuessr and getting within a few kilometres on all five rounds. Take that, rural Australia!
(it also helps that I'm American enough to recognise an outline of Ohio on a state-highway road sign)
---
†Although I'm not sure if it was *intended* as a successor, or if it was a convergent-evolution thing.
