GEOGUESSR is a web-based geography game that takes you on a journey around the world. The game works by dropping you into a semi-random Google Street View locale from somewhere on Earth and challenges you to guess your location on a map.
The player then may move along the roads through the directional controls provided by Google Street View. Once the player guesses the location, GeoGuessr reveals the true geographic location and assigns the player a score.
The game tests your ability to recognise your surroundings using visible clues such as the language used on signboards or street signs.
Since Covid-19 has put a brake on global travel, the game has seen a surge in interest in recent months, thanks to players and streamers on Twitch, YouTube and Tik Tok, allowing players a little escapism, sightseeing and global knowledge.
The game is designed by Anton Wallen, a Swedish IT consultant, and was released on May 9, 2013. The idea for GeoGuessr came from Wallen’s love of visiting faraway locations on Google Street View to see how it would feel being there.
The game now has three main modes – Career, Play with Friends, and Classic. The Career mode is arguably the most exciting category, where you can find stress-inducing events in GeoGuessr. There are City Streaks, Battle Royale Countries and Battle Royale Distance, among other upcoming events.
City Streaks places you in a city and you have to guess the city you are in, until you run out of lives in a specified time limit.
For Battle Royale Distance, players place a pin on a map as to their guess, and the person whose pin is furthest from the actual location is eliminated. This process repeats until there is one person left, who eventually becomes the winner.
Under Classic mode, there is Explorer, Streaks, Daily Challenge, Pro Leagues and Map Maker. There are variants on GeoGuessr, which allows you to choose the countries you would like to play in or allow players to make their own map with handcrafted locations, enhancing the experience for members and adding to the competitiveness of the game.
GeoGuessr piques curiosity and allows players to gain a little more insight on what another country is like. The game’s potential as a teaching aid has also resulted in the launch of its education programme – GeoGuessr Education.
Aside from being educational, it allows players to see global imbalances as well. The random nature of the game means that you see stark economic differences in the space of a couple of minutes, from mansions in Los Angeles to thatched shacks in Senegal.
Currently, not all the countries are available in GeoGuessr as it depends on Google Street View coverage. However, the site is being constantly updated and developers have been listening to what their players like.
For example, players competed to get perfect scores on challenging game presets such as NMPZ (No Moving, Panning or Zooming), and GeoGuessr recently announced that NMPZ-settings are available for certain events.
The game allows one free game per day for normal GeoGuessr accounts, and a Pro Membership gets you all the features such as playing unlimited maps per day, Battle Royale, Compete with friends, ad and wait-free between rounds, creating leagues, and building your own maps starting from US$1.99 (RM8.28) per month, with a 10-day free-trial period.
The reason GeoGuessr requires a paid account is because of Google’s decision to change their API (application programming interface) prices to 14 times more. Since Geoguessr uses Google Maps and Streetview, it requires money to use their data on an external website like Geoguessr.
Nevertheless, you can always use this for a fun group online activity with friends by picking a random spot on Google Maps Street View.
