I both hate and love geolocation games. Take GeoGuessr. I hate to play it myself because I’m clueless at it. But I love to watch it being played by others. It suddenly opens up. It becomes something thrilling.
GeoGuessr is a geolocation game that runs on a browser or on your phone. Load it up and it shows you a snapshot from a Google Street View camera or somesuch, taken from somewhere around the world. It could be from anywhere. You have to use what’s visible on the screen to work out where you think you are on Planet Earth, and then you drop a pin into a map with your guess, and the game tells you how close you actually were. It’s simplicity itself in theory, but playing it, and playing it well, is the absolute opposite of simple.
To explain the problems I face with GeoGuessr, I did what I absolutely hate to do and played a round this morning. The image loads: a street terminating in what looks like a park. Urban – a capital somewhere given the scale and density of the buildings, the width of the streets. Cream buildings, a little dirty and scuffed. Anonymous modern cars. Definitely Europe. Could be Fitzrovia, but could be Paris, or Budapest, a city that I know often stands in for Paris on film. And if it could be Budapest couldn’t it be Bucharest? Prague? Not Bratislava – the scale is all wrong. What a wonky list! How addled and misdirected by the whims of memory. I take a punt on the blurred license plates and guess London. And guys? It was Paris, 339 km away from where I dropped my pin.
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