The road is long, and probably in South America

[nineveh_uk]

I have a new time-sink, and its name is Geoguessr. This ' web-based geographic discovery game' (Wikipedia) involves being plonked down anywhere in the world that Google Street View has been* and having to guess where you are and mark you location on a map of the world. You can (usually) navigate along the streets**, you can read (most) road signs, but not things that Google has blurred (occasionally road signs), and most of all you can look about you and wonder where you might be.

It's a lot of fun, and depending on how much you care about finding where exactly you are in any given round of five places, potentially a major waste of time. Playing alone, I am inclined to set a max of 5 minutes per location, sometimes less when I think "This is the middle of a desert/forest with nothing for several hundred miles, I feel strangely confident that I know which continent we're on, so I'm just going to click somewhere plausible in Australia/Russia", a technique that can get you surprisingly close at times for not just random reasons. It's fascinating to see the places that you go, but I also find the process of guessing is itself interesting. The combination of personal experience of a place, general knowledge, random osmosis, and the kind of hunch that has you going 'That looks like Hungary' despite having a decidedly limited acquaintance with Hungary. Place names on road signs are great - well, major place names, the ones for tiny villages in Siberia are less useful - but nothing beats the screen opening and just somehow knowing that you're in Norway.*** And if you don't know where you are, there are vast numbers of clues, natural and artificial. Skies, clouds, vegetation, season, the local people, crops, domestic architecture, economic situation, anything being advertised, things not being advertised. Sometimes you can just tell, thanks to that one school geography lesson that taught you about Brasilia, sometimes you haven't got a clue. It is often infuriating, and still a lot of fun.

*South America would have a lot more competition in the 'Where on earth is this beyond South America?' stakes if they had done more of Africa or any of China yet.

**Except when you find yourself plonked down in a random field, and Indian temple, or a German kitchen shop.

*** Except for being on a street you used to walk down between the pub and the Cambridge railway station.

Comments

[perennialanna]

I once knew someone who was so obsessed with getting it to the nearest ten metres that he kept spreadsheets of his results...

Still, he's gone and these days I have a laptop that can actually cope with Geoguessr, and the only one I was more than a hundred miles off was the curiously flat Eastern European village which appeared to have no way in or out, which turned out to be not so much Eastern European as Russian Far East, Jewish Autonomous region to be exact, which I hadn't known about before, and that ate up another half hour. I was about two thousand miles off with that one.

[nineveh_uk]

Just when one might think one were a bit too obsessed with something, there come people with spreadsheets to reassure...

I didn't know that there was a Jewish Autonomous Region in the Russian Far East, either. See, educational! Though Wikipedia tells me that most of the Jewish residents emigrated, which given the history one can see why they would.

[clanwilliam]

I love the more specific ones too - the London one has weird GPS going on, since I can be exactly on the spot and it'll tell me I'm off by several metres!

[nineveh_uk]

The internet tells me that lots of buildings or rocks makes GPS worse because the signal can bounce/suffer delay, which sounds plausible for London.

I've enjoyed the EU one, which offers the joy of greater familiarity with the potential for happy accident of the global one.

[antisoppist]

I found myself checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverage_of_Google_Street_View

I'm not sure if the map of Google slowly conquering the world is brilliant or terrifying.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Goodness, that is addictive! Thanks for introducing me to it!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

You thank me now... Just wait until you're considering whether you should learn which petrol stations are in which countries :-)