What is Geoguessr and why am I such a little freak about it
Mentally I am here
Geoguessr is a game that turns the all-seeing eye of the Google Street View car into fun little games for the computer user at home. In the classic version, the player is dropped in a Google Street View in some location anywhere on earth. You then guess your location on an inset Google map, and are awarded points, up to 5,000 per round, depending on how close you are. The easiest version of the game allows you to move around, zoom, and pan the 360 images, driving along the roads until you are able to accumulate enough clues to pinpoint where you are.
Over the pandemic I became obsessed with playing Geoguessr. In the early days of the work-from-home, I was at a job where I had hours of zoom meetings a day, meetings that I did not need to participate in but did need to kind-of pay attention to. I discovered that if I played Geoguessr on my computer, it looked like I was paying attention, even though I was actually trying to figure out in which Norwegian fjord I had just been deposited. It was real “mentally I am here” hours, and it worked. Trapped in my apartment, I had found website that let me explore other places in the world that, even if I was able to travel, I would likely never go.
Other people must have felt similarly, because the game has expanded over the last year, including the unfortunately-named “Career Mode” (nothing is ever for fun, everything must become a job eventually). There are timed battles where you compete against other players, streak games where you see how many countries you can get right in a row, and even a page that links to anyone playing Geoguessr on Twitch at that time.
Watching the Twitch guys and girls is instructive, a way to pick up all the cheats that can reveal a country, like the colors of the chevron signs that indicate the road ahead is turning or the borders on the blurred-out license plates. One Twitch streamer was staying online until he guessed a thousand countries right in a row. He identified Brazil based on the back of a road sign (apparently it is only Brazil that paints the back of their signs black).
I don’t know many cheats, instead I go off of what another Twitch streamer kept calling the ‘vibe.’ The ability to identify a place based on vibe is what I like about the game in general, the way it makes me feel familiar with the world even if I haven’t been there.
Geoguessr, to me, is valuable not for its accuracy, but for its randomness, which feels increasingly hard to find on the internet these days. After a round, I like to look up the places I’ve been and see what there is to do around there, what I might have seen had I explored a little better and not been so focused on finding out street names. These searches lead to Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, and local news sites that can be translated with the click of a button. When the rest of the Internet is based on an algorithm dedicated to showing you things that are like the things you have already seen, Geoguessr feels like a corrective to that. This one weird trick for exploring the world.
I want to write about Geoguessr because I want to write in general, but a lot of the time instead of writing I play Geoguessr. I’m hoping that this is a nice way to trick my brain, which only seems to be willing to do things if it is being tricked. I pitched it to friends and they said I should make it into a TikTok account of some kind, which makes sense seeing that TikTok is popular and also that people can make money off of it, but any time I download TikTok I lose several hundred hours of my life and also feel like I’m going insane, so that isn’t really an option for me.
We’ll see what happens - hope you enjoy!