If you play the popular map and geography game Geoguessr, you may have run across locations that had you wanting more information on what was pictured in the photography and/or why the location was part of the map. Many map challenges have themes, which help explain why a location is part of the map, but what if you want to know more?
How about some examples, one being a popular Chatguessr map by nuujaka and a few examples from my own maps. “A Linguistic World” is a popular map by nuujaka that features locations that have language in the Google Streetview photography, often signs that have multiple languages. Many of the other maps feature rare and uncommon languages, a well as regional dialects. If you don’t know the languages in a location and aren’t playing the map with somebody who does, there is little you can do to quickly find out meta information about the languages shown in the map, unless you transcribed the languages to a web search. More than likely, you probably don’t even have access to special characters or diacritics.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the map (after you guess) had meta information about what was special about the location from the map maker?
I have compiled several maps that could use such a feature to provide more information to curious players. This also would add an additional educational dimension to the game. “Movie Locations Around the World,” “Bookstores Around the World” and “Public Sculpture Around the Word” are the types of maps that could be enhanced by additional meta information. Movie locations are often easy to associate with a movie, but some locations are more obscure or were used for multiple movies. It would be cool to have a button after the guess that could be clicked to pop-up meta information about the plonk (location). The map maker could add “This was the house featured in ‘Mildred Pierce’, which won Joan Crawford an Oscar” or “This obscure town in southern Spain was the site of several Clint Eastwood westerns.”
Similarly, my “Public Sculpture Around the World” could have added meta information about the artist and title of the work and the bookstore map could include the name of the bookstore and types of books. With many Geoguessr locations, names of businesses are often blurred or illegible.
Of course, one possible pitfall with this feature would be people abusing the new meta field. We don’t want assholes posting vulgarity, offensive language, or advertisements. Geoguessr could prevent most of this by limiting this service to verified Geoguessr map creators. It could also make this available as a higher tier subscription option.
PrairiePirateYo’s maps can be found on Geoguessr under the same creator name. He streams Geoguessr with Chat on Monday and Friday afternoons at 5pm EDT.
Other recommended Geoguessr streamers: Etsybean, celerymin, HeyPando, and KingMoo92.