Of all the innovations this century, the most wonderful to me is Google Street View. Twenty years from now, it may be as quaint as a yellowing antique globe, but it has kept me enthralled since it appeared in 2007.Sweden’s GeoGuessr makes the Domesday Book of our global times even more enthralling.
Last week, I was at my desk in New York trying to avoid work. So by way of procrastination, I went for an onscreen stroll around where I once lived in Nottingham. Lovely to see quiet, English streets after being away for a while.
One thing led to another and next I was exploring Qaqortoq, a town of 3,229 people in southern Greenland. Amazing, harsh light. Kids playing in the streets. Who’d have thought?
Then I went to a street in Nikolsk, a small town hundreds of miles south-east of Moscow and looked at someone’s house with a pile of wood, a chicken and a VW outside it.
When I first went to the USSR in 1971, people would ask what this closed, scary place looked like. Did they have shops, cars? Did people walk the streets? Today, much of Russia is there to explore, in high definition. Even without including China, or much of India and Germany, Google cameras have covered more than 5m miles of roads.
This is, surely, the Domesday Book of our global times? Privacy issues be blowed, for me, anyone who doesn’t marvel at it severely lacks imagination and curiosity.
If you’re with me on that, then, prepare now to have your Christmas radically altered, because I have found an online game based on Street View, which I’ve been playing this past year and believe may be the best downtime diversion ever invented.
It is called GeoGuessr. It was devised as a hobby by a group of IT professionals collaborating across Sweden “during the hard Swedish winter of 2013” as they say on their website. Suggesting they, too, had time on their hands. But GeoGuessr is gaining so many fans that it is becoming a business.
The game deposits the player in a random Street View spot somewhere on the globe. It is then your job to work out where you are, to the closest metre. You can do this on your own, or with a challenger, who can be in the same room, or another location. I’ve been playing it transatlantically with a daughter, keeping Skype open as we play to goad/mock/disrupt the other’s efforts. We are quite competitive.
You make up your own rules. Some just guess, based on the flora, fauna, light, whatever. We choose to scoot around roads in the locale, which may be in a city (easy) or a dirt track in the Amazon (not easy) looking carefully for clues — a road sign, or, maybe, a phone number on a van. We then use Google, plus considerable cunning, to guess where we are. You click on your chosen spot on an inset map on your PC screen and discover how close your estimation was — the nearer, the more points.
I’ve got within 40 metres in the Atacama Desert in Chile — my proudest GeoGuessr moment — to 14,000km astray when I thought Patagonia was Estonia.
GeoGuessrs get really cross when the challenge is a featureless forest in Scandinavia or Canada. You get deeply smug when you can read Cyrillic for clues, your daughter can’t, and the location is Russian. You feel helpless when it’s rural Thailand and you can’t read Thai.
You come across extraordinary things on your travels. We once saw a massive bloodstain by a road in rural South Africa, close to what Google revealed was the local murder capital. We also witnessed what seemed to be a police chase in Sarawak, Borneo.
We have come to believe, however, that the algorithms are generally biased to include a surfeit of inscrutable forests.
So I contacted the developers. This was not easy. The guys are not exactly publicity-hunters. The founder, Anton Wallén, is on Twitter, but has tweeted just three times in four years.
He eventually communicated by email via a more outgoing colleague. I raised the featureless forests issue.
“I have to give a bit of a boring answer that it varies,” Mr Wallén said. “At the core the locations are selected randomly, but to give a better experience and a more even distribution of locations we do some tweaks to the location selection.”
This is a mystery solved for GeoGuessr addicts, but not as big news as this: the developers have in the past few days launched an iPad and iPhone version of the game. I may now be able to cube my levels of procrastination in 2016.
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