Murphies: May 2013

Friday, May 17, 2013

Have you played Geoguessr yet?

It's a geographical guessing game that drops you into a location somewhere on Earth, using Google street maps, and lets you try to figure out where you are. You can navigate up and down the roads, turn around and zoom in to check out your surroundings. You get five chances to guess five different places and then the game ends and you see your score and a map of your guesses. Warning, it's addictive.

There seem to be two ways to play: look around a little, check out the trees, the buildings, the language on the signs and take a wild guess whether you're in Norway or Madagascar or New Zealand.

Luck plays into it. You might really have to guess if you land in a spot like this:

But if there are more details, like landmarks or signs with town or business names, you can use Google in another tab to search and figure out EXACTLY where you are.

I'm told that's cheating, but I don't care. Here's the best I've done with five lucky scenes with lots of detail and method #2 so far this evening, having discovered the game an hour or two ago::

Or you can just be a tourist and wander around and look at things and find out what it looks like in a small town in Poland with wooden gingerbread on old buildings and schoolchildren waiting for a city bus or a strange hostile city in Russia where the concrete buildings are too cold and large and the spaces between too forbidding and exhausting or a coastal village in Mexico where the sea laps on the sand and the wind blows constantly against the palms. That's fun too.