“This smells very strongly of the South Pacific. “Nauru?” says the streamer Pol Turrents in front of a Google Maps photo of some containers, a dock with a rusty hangar and a leafy tree. Open a map, click on a place on the island of Nauru and yes, you’re right: the photo is from Nauru. Turrents, better known on Twitch and TikTok as Polispol1, plays GeoGuessr, a geographic video game that involves guessing the location from a random photo on Google Maps.
On October 13 and 14, the first GeoGuessr World Cup will be played in Sweden. Turrents comments on it in Spanish on his Twitch channel. There will be 24 players – only one woman, from the Netherlands – who will share $50,000 in prizes. There are 60 million accounts registered in GeoGuessr, not all of them active, according to data from the Swedish company that has kept the game alive since its creation in 2013. The Spanish-language community is the fifth most popular, behind English, French, Japanese and Portuguese.
The growing success of GeoGuessr is partly surprising: it is a cultural video game that rewards skills other than the usual ones. “They have less to do with command expertise and more to do with cultural knowledge,” Turrents says. It is fascinating to see the best players guess in seconds which country or region a random image of a highway or street in the world belongs to. Whoever gets closest to the place wins points. There are three basic game modes, from most difficult to least: strict still photo, option to rotate and zoom the image, and moving back and forth through the streets.
There are dozens of clues that can help you recognize a place. Hearing the reasoning live is incredible. There are pages dedicated to organizing the best clues or tips for beginners: the vegetation, the signs, the asphalt, the sidewalks or the Google car (there are countries, especially African ones, where you can see the rearview mirrors or other parts). Although sometimes there is clearer evidence: a flag, the size of license plates [los números no, porque Google los difumina]a sign in Korean or Hebrew.
Topotic for Spain
The Spanish representative in the World Cup is Topotic, a 22-year-old young man who prefers not to give his real name or city of residence. “There are players who specialize in knowing Google cars, poles or even the dates of Google coverage,” Topotic tells EL PAÍS by phone. It is basic to know that China is not mapped or which African countries are and which are not. “There are other players more focused on vegetation,” Topotic continues. “Others still look at place names to be able to read the signs [en la lengua local] and instantly get the exact location or even the provincial or regional prefixes of the telephones of each country. I have also learned a few for this championship,” he adds.
Although it will officially compete, Topotic is not a professional: “It is more difficult to be one than with other video games.” He combines the game with college and dedicates time to it in spurts. “Some professional gamers are networking and producing content, but very few can make a living,” says Daniel Antell, CEO of GeoGuessr, by email. “There are community tournaments, but there are no prize money or real sponsors. We aspire to establish GeoGuessr as a eSport and support our players as creators and professionals. The World Cup is a step in that direction, it not only provides credibility as eSport, but also showcases the incredible skill of the players to a wider audience,” he adds. The video game has a free version and a paid version for less than 2 euros per month.
When they have played thousands of games, the best players trust their “intuition” to get the country right. But the level of detail that comes with that trust is unimaginable. This is how Rainbolt, one of the most famous creators along with Geowizard, describes his knowledge of telephone or electric poles to Wired: “There are different types: ladders, with holes, A-shaped or with a hook. And then the materials: wood, concrete. 95% of the concrete poles in Australia are in Victoria. If I see a black sticker, driving left looking very tropical, it will be mainland Malaysia. Or in France there is a blue sticker on their telephone poles. And the stair posts are in Spain, Portugal, France.”
The Rainbolt and Geowizard videos are at the origin of the interest of many players. “I can guess where I am on Google Maps in 0.1 seconds,” is one of Rainbolt’s mythical phrases in his tiktoks. But there is more variety: “I started basically like almost everyone else in Spain, I had some colleagues who had seen an ElRubius video back in 2016,” says Topotic.
The big ones streamers Spaniards continue playing GeoGuessr. Polispol1 is his most declared admirer, but Ibai or ElRubius play from time to time in front of their audiences. It is a delicate game because it shows the culture of the player: “There may be streamers to those who are somewhat afraid, because suddenly not knowing the capital of Paraguay or Bolivia can make you look ridiculous.”
The big ones streamers Spaniards use GeoGuessr to chat with their communities: “It goes in spurts,” says Polispol1. “Ibai likes it very much. ElRubius also plays. If you have international communities, he helps us get to know them better. It has happened to me many times, while playing, that I end up in Uruguay or Chile and someone tells me that they live three blocks away, that there is a restaurant around the corner,” he adds. He also gives “conversation topics” to chat with the community through the Twitch chat: “I play relaxed, you go down a street in Bulgaria and a video store appears and you comment on it. “I like geography, it allows us to talk about culture, politics,” he adds.
“Sometimes I get tiktoks of a kid who is literally scary,” jokes Auronplay, one of the streamers most popular Spanish. “They release him in the middle of the desert. He says ‘the sand is yellow, the sky is blue, this is surely Tanzania’. It’s weird.” That kid that Auronplay mentions is Alvacerod, a 23-year-old Tourism graduate who works in a hotel in Seville and who has the largest exclusive GeoGuessr TikTok account in Spain.
His videos are popular because they really seem like magic: with a handful of details he can guess the place. “At the end of the day, what I do is upload the best games from my live shows,” Alvacerod explains by phone. “Then I also do research on where a famous video clip was recorded or where a meme happened. I prepare those separately, I make my scripts,” he adds.
There are also traps
It’s a lot of work and you find it difficult to combine the videos with your work and practice to be better. This workload led him to fake videos and he was the subject of a complaint for community cheating. Rainbolt posted a video in April on YouTube denouncing Alvacerod. This is as if Leo Messi made a video to denounce that a Kings League player is doping. Alvacerod admitted that he played with prepared maps, where the images were not random, and pretended that he guessed them. He immediately apologized publicly in another video.
“[Rainbolt] “It made me very green,” says Alvacerod now. “I was a little annoyed because I copied some of the formats. The Internet is a free place, you can do whatever you want, right? But I understand that it may have bothered you,” he says. The phrase Alvacerod uses to start his videos is the long version of Rainbolt: “I’m dropped into a totally random place in the world and I have to guess exactly where I am on Google Maps.”
“Out of spite and for people who have been in the Spanish community longer than me, who came from nowhere and started making videos because of what I saw about Rainbolt and others youtubers who were English, I honestly got a lot of ideas from there. In the community they would say this random where it appeared from and, of course, the top ones, they had a bit of annoyance towards me,” explains Alvacerod. They passed a document with details of the traps to Rainbolt, who made the video.
Alvacerod himself worries about the ease of cheating on GeoGuessr. It is obvious that you cannot look at Google on an extra screen to see where a town is or where a telephone prefix is from. The creators of the video game know it: “As in many games, cheating is possible,” says the company. “We work to avoid them. Last week we launched the ability for players to watch replays of how their opponents played. “Actions like this that increase transparency along with functions such as the automatic refund of points lost to opponents when one is suspended help us move in the right direction,” they add.
Alvacerod believes that competitive tournaments depend too much on the honesty of the opponents: “It is a game that I see as more entertaining than competitive, because there is a very strange void, you will never know if the person behind is cheating or not,” he says. .
The resources used by GeoGuessr creators and players are useful for other things. Open source intelligence, which has helped solve crimes, uses the same methods to find where exactly something happened. They also use it to help find out where an old photo of someone who is no longer around was taken. It can be delicate, because some interested parties may want to discover where another person was who they want to find for some obscure reason: “They write to me by private message and I try to help as much as possible, and I do it because I like it and I feel like it. to practice and to get better at geolocation, but when I see strange accounts or someone who asks me for a photo and a girl comes out or things like that, I don’t do it,” warns Alvacerod.
GeoGuessr also offered a service for schools, which allowed “a school to have multiple accounts available to its students,” according to the company, which no longer offers it. “We also regularly receive photographs or texts from teachers and students who talk about learning geography through our game,” they add.
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