App+1 | Take a trip from home: GeoGuessr
It was hard to get through another holiday, but the sporadic epidemic got in the way of getting out again. Since I took advantage of the epidemic to change city life, I haven't had much of a chance to get out and about. It was so difficult to get around the country, let alone to see the great sights abroad. With that in mind, I suddenly remembered the geography game "GeoGuessr" that the anchor I've been watching lately has been playing, and used it as a travel substitute.
GeoGuessr was released in 2013, and it started out as a web game with only one mode. The game would give a Google Maps street view, and you could move around and determine where you were by the various details in the map - it wasn't enough to know what country, you needed to get the chosen location point as close as possible to the map's real location.
In Classic mode, players play five consecutive rounds with a maximum of 5,000 points per round, with points awarded based on the distance between the selected coordinates and the actual coordinates --seems like a generous requirement, but the conditions that confer a full score actually vary widely from map to map. Easier city maps start deducting points for more than a few dozen meters. For example, I guessed two kilometres off the marked position on a South American bridge across the sea, and the system considered those two kilometres worth eleven points; the right-hand side of the map above is a famous landmark, and you'd almost have to hit on its mark to get full marks.
Take the best game I've ever played, for example. I was dropped directly in a city corner like the one pictured below, with few pedestrians nearby and shops mostly closed. The compass shows me facing east.
Take a casual walk around the neighborhood and spot nearby street signs and billboards. This is a strategy often used in GeoGuessr, to determine one's location by the language text. The road sign on the left still looks bilingual, so this place has its own language and often uses English, so while I'm not sure where this is, I have a rough guess in my mind: either Quebec or a Western/Northern European country.
Sure enough, a few more steps and there was the answer, Dublin, the capital of Ireland.
Actually, in this case, guessing any point in Dublin would have been a high score, but I decided to keep looking. After crossing a street, I saw a statue, situated in the middle of the main road. Walking further on I could see the bigger statue again. In fact, if I happened to be more familiar with Dublin's cultural history, I could guess where I was now, but I still wasn't sure, so I continued backing up.
The next street scene was the point that allowed me to confirm my orientation: the road opposite became a triangular fork and I was on a bridge. So I started looking down the River Liffey, which flows through Dublin, for a nearby bridge with a 'triangle' 'four lanes in each direction' 'with a statue building in the middle', and finally found the location below. This is the O'Connell Bridge in Dublin. I was just on O'Connell Street, the big statue is the O'Connell Monument and the white statue behind it is the John Gray Monument, both were Irish politicians.
The next task was to backtrack where I had just started, and again, based on the road signs on Liffey Street, I found where I was , which was only five metres away from the actual filming location.
That's the basic playbook of GeoGuessr: use all the clues Street View provides as much as possible, including language words, people features, city structures, natural environments, plant and animal species, and advertising signs - I've relied on the geo-top-level domains of websites on billboards to get clues to countries. Of course, you can also rely on search engines to assist, except that it has such a wide range of questions that you can't get a clue purely by searching.
In addition to the classic mode of leisurely map hunting, GeoGuessr adds a Battle Royale mode, where you'll compete with players from around the world to guess the country of multiple maps in several consecutive one-and-a-half minute sessions, or eliminate them in order based on distance from the marker. The overall guessing idea remains the same, but because of the time limit, you'll need faster reflexes, quicker hand speed, and a broader knowledge base of human/physical geography.
The game uses the Freemium model, which allows free accounts to play for five minutes straight, after which you need to wait ten minutes to continue playing. Paid accounts can be unrestricted, with an annual subscription translating to $1.99 per month and a monthly subscription for $2.99 per month. In my personal experience, you can lose three games in a row in Battle Royale mode in five minutes if you're good enough (?) I'm not sure if it's enough to get up and play a game or two. The game is also available as an iOS client (not yet available in China), but the wait time for a free account is longer than the web version, and you can only play three games a day.
If you're interested in experiencing the experience of traveling around your home or the panic of being left in the middle of nowhere and trying to figure out where you are, open your browser and go to geoguessr.com to start playing. Feel free to show your battles in the comments section.