A true map quest

Last week I discovered something that guaranteed I would never be productive again in my life.

It’s called GeoGuessr (geoguessr.com), and it exhibits addictive properties somewhere between nicotine and heroin.

The premise is simple.

At the beginning of each of the five rounds in a game, you are dropped into a random Google street view somewhere in the world.

You have as much time as you like to navigate and “explore the world,” as the game’s motto puts it.

Then you have to guess where you are by dropping a pin on a political map of the globe.

You earn points for each round based on how close your guess was to your actual
location.

Clues come in all forms. Signs, cars, vegetation, landscapes and even people give you hints as to where you are.

It’s harder than it sounds, though.

You quickly learn that Texas, southern Africa and most of Australia have the same
barren brown landscape. Scandinavia looks astonishingly like many parts of Canada.
You can make a guess with confidence, and end up being off by thousands of miles.

The game truly is beautiful. It might be on a computer screen, but it allows you to at least pretend you’re walking through a seaside village in southern France or winding up a snowy mountain trail in the Rockies.

Sure, there are a lot of empty dirt roads in the middle of nowhere, but that makes a close guess even more rewarding.

It’s also quite educational.

Since last Monday, I’ve learned what countries drive on what side of the road. I’ve also tripled my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet to help me get my bearings in Russia, figured out the basics of how Brazil labels their interstate system and memorized the flags of most central European countries.

More than anything, the game is an exercise in deductive reasoning.

Your goal is to collect as much information as possible to work your way from continent to region to country to town to street to intersection, before finally figuring out where in the world you are.

As far as time-killing activities go, it’s as intellectually stimulating as it gets. And it obviously does wonders for general geographical knowledge.

There really aren’t any rules, so dozens of variations have popped up around
the web. Some, myself included, refuse to use external resources like Google Maps. Others impose time limits and restrictions on how much you can move around. However you play, your inner nerd will love it.

So if you find yourself with free time on your hands this summer, give it a shot.

Go explore the world!

­— sreddiga@indiana.edu