The camera-mounted truck that traveled through South Africa's Kruger National Park has a camo-green paint job and a pair of white rack on its rooftop. If you pan down and see the blurry edges on Street View, you know that you are in a 7,523 square mile area north of Eswatini and west of Mozambique.
More people are joining the ranks of those who take the browser game GeoGuessr every day because of this useless piece of information.
The game is easy to play. In each round, a player is dropped at a random location on the street view map. Players are challenged to identify their coordinates on a map as quickly as they can, using only the context clues gleaned from the surrounding fauna, climate, billboards, and language. The Kruger National Park's truck becomes vital information at the highest levels of cutthroat metagaming ambition.
One of the moderators of the competitive section of the website says that if you play the game for two years, you might not see that car again. If you can remember it over a long period of time, that's a huge advantage.
It was never intended to be played at high stakes. The game was written by a Swedish IT professional named Anton Wallén, who was working on a project to fill in the gaps in worldwide camera coverage. I decided to make a small application after fiddling around with the two. Wallén wrote on an ancient thread that he would appreciate your feedback. It became one of those enduring social media curios, something you showed your mom on winter break. The idea that anyone would be able to destroy Wallén's invention in the same way that top World of Warcraft guilds destroy raid bosses was ridiculous.
Pro players can find out where they are based by looking at the environment.
Scores of subscribers now log on to watch Tom Davies, who has trained long and hard to become oracular, all-seeing masters of Street View. It is amazing to watch him cook. Davies walks into a flea market, pans the camera around, and sees the abbreviation "KSI" on a banner. Does that mean anything to the city of Kumasi in central Ghana? He pins down his location with accuracy. He says it's fair enough to be 2.2 miles away. A few minutes later, Davies travels down a river and looks at a few highway signs that say "I think this is Montenegro." He is within five yards of the match.
One of the most unexpected trends in gaming is Davies. More than 240,000 people follow thegeoguessr tag on twitch, and a competition hosted by the French player AntoineDaniel earned over 100,000 views. At a time when the future of the industry is in doubt, many young players discovered that the drama of playing a game is as much a part of video games as the music.
RadoX1988 is not sure how this happened. There were only about 10 users competing when he started. He says that they all played the daily challenge together. When a huge swathe of fresh blood poured into the community at the end of 2020, they were eager to showcase their topographic aptitude. It is thought that a zeitgeist circled around the newly launched "Battle Royale" mode, which translated the anxious, one-vs-all bedlam of Fortnite into the sedate act of map-pointing. He says that it made GeoGuessr mainstream for the first time.
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Street View controls, a map, and the challenge of figuring out where you are on Earth are all provided by GeoGuessr.
The newly rejuvenated cast of pin-droppers tearing up the game is welcome by the head of communications at GeoGuessr, says Filip Antell. The function allows players to create their own round-robin tournaments. They have put together aCareer Mode with daily challenges and experience points, which is reminiscent of League of Legends and Counter-Strike, nudging GeoGuessr closer to esports terrain. When you look at the pro players that can be dropped anywhere in the world, it is really jaw-dropping. I believe that when you see someone excel in that field, it encourages you to do the same.
Those who invest in the art of atlas combat must create their own rivals because there is no centralized competitive infrastructure in the game. Anyone can host a tournament, and they come in a variety of flavors. The regular season of the Reddit League ranks players on their win/loss records before crowning a winner and relegating the bottom-feeders. Each week, the Street View action goes down in a different region, accentuating theVersatility necessary for longitudinal superiority. You have to be serious about it and play on the regular. The World Cup challenge is where players compete head to head in away and home games. The first match takes place in one player's country, the second in another player's country, like a summer series between the Yankees and Red Sox.
It is difficult for organizers to prevent cheating.
Prizes are rarely on the line in high-level play. Zotomo, the tournament organizers in Japan, tells me that the champion of the tournament will receive a trophy or a subscription to a game service, which will give them an unlimited number of free games on the platform. For most of the time, the only reward is a title. This is the nature of the beast. Zotomo explains that the game is a free browser game. That makes it easy for someone to open a tab and start searching for a street they're going to land on. It is difficult for organizers to prevent cheating. Prizes can't be given away without a lot of issues.
It is the only barrier facing the esport as it continues to stretch its legs as a sport. Wallén's game was developed on the back of data from the internet, and as a result, the headquarters will never have full control of its server. Does that mean we can't have a lot of LAN events, cash prizes, and pageantry in the future? Not necessarily. Antell thinks that an official GeoGuessr Masters would be interesting to set up in the future. One can dream.
I am aware of his optimism. The team at thegeoguessr has shown that a geography game can be played in the same way as Call of Duty. The players are eager to demonstrate how quickly they can identify the trucks of Kruger National Park. The sky is limited by the sun, the mountains, and a few road signs.
