Post-180: Geo-Guesser

One of the Norwegian students in my Korean language class introduced me to “GeoGuessr“. (I have to say “one of” because there are, incredibly, two Norwegians in it, of twelve total students.)

Geoguessr is a game. It drops you at a random spot on the planet Earth along a roadway (using Google Street View). You have a certain amount of time to make your best guess about where you are, based on whatever clues you can gather around you in “Street View” mode. You can move along the roads a little, looking at signs, scenery, buildings, plant types, whatever. The closer your guess is  to the actual location you were “dropped”, the more points you get.

Here is the result of my first attempt:

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For “D”, I saw a building labelled “Richmond Butchery” on the road. It was a dusty road, looking something like Nevada, but I plopped my guess-marker down near Richmond, Virginia. That was about as wrong as one can get without exiting the Earth atmosphere, as you can see above.

The subject of this game came up in an interesting way. I was talking to the Norwegian, J., at some length, after the class one day. The subject of Iowa came up. It’s where my father is from, and is also where I spent a fair amount of time in my childhood: Over a year of my life was there, I suppose, if all the visits are added together. I was telling him that a lot of Norwegians settled around there (including some of my father’s ancestors), which he seemed to already know. (He had explained, earlier, that one of my grandmother’s special dishes, “lefse”, is still eaten a lot in Norway, sold in convenience stores, as “not quite a snack, not quite a meal”, which is about how it was eaten in my grandma’s household as well.) Anyway, I said something like “you can’t imagine how Iowa is; it’s so flat and almost completely farmland”. He said something like “Actually, I think I can imagine it — I think I’ve been through Iowa…..on the computer.” Then he explained this Geoguessr game.