I suppose the game room is the correct choice for this thread.
I just discovered Geoguessr and played 4 times. The closest I got was 292 km (Nevada instead of Utah). I got twice the correct country with an absurdly large distance (Novossibirsk instead of St Petersburg, US East coast instead of US West coast) and once the wrong country but a rather short distance (South Africa instead of Botswana)
What are your closest guesses?
Also : how are picked the spot proposed? I suppose they’re proposed by players, but I’m not sure how.
I’m really not sure, but I did notice some odd trends - there seem to be a lot of backroads in Scandinavia, for example, and I’ve had lots of rural/small town locations in Canada but never anything even approaching a major city, while Russian locations seem more likely to be urban than rural. US locations seem to be far more likely to be Great Plains or Southwest than east coast. Some of this might be confirmation bias, but after quite a few rounds there really do seem to be some odd skews in the locations.
Anyways, wrt the main question, I’ve gotten a few with 0 error. But do keep in mind there’s 2 or 3 completely different games you can play with Geoguessr. The first, which appears to be what you did, is no googling and no moving around in the game looking for road signs etc. Look for clues from the initial vantage point that might tell you where you are. Second is moving around in-game to find more clues. And third is then using google and even google maps in another window to turn those clues into more solid information.
Unless you get really lucky with a location, getting error down to metres generally requires at least the second technique.
Thanks for the answers. In fact, after the second game, I realized that I could move around and did so, though it seemed I was limited to a rather short distance.
And indeed : does anyone has a clue about how the scoring works?
My first three challenges I was 7000 km off (I guessed Mexico, it was Brazil) and then two 700s (in the U.S. South, and one I guess Manitoba but it was South Dakota.)
Then I got a picture of a completely nondescript road. No signs were visible, just a blacktop road and some scrubby forest. I just looked at the picture, nothing else.
“I bet that’s Australia,” I thought. I don’t know why - it looked hot, I guess. I clicked on a spot somewhere northwest of Sydney.
Mine were all in the middle of nowhere on lonely, featureless roads. For the first 3 I couldn’t even pick the right continent. The last 2 in Alaska and France I was within 100km.
I have done much better since.
Addictive little sucker once you start following the roads looking for clues. clairobscur posted that she couldn’t move far. I found a couple of times the movement seemed restricted - the oval down the road wouldn’t work, but the arrow would or vice versa, but I seemed to be able to go as far as I wanted until boredom set in.
Check out the maps linked to in this thread. First map is “Where Google Street View is Available” which concedes quite neatly with the geographic bias in Geoguessr.
I’ve gotten within a half km a couple times - both when the game dropped me right in front of a sign with the location’s name on it. (One, right next to the post office in some small midwestern town, I can’t remember, the other in Macao - and not only was there a ‘welcome to Macao’ sign, but I was within walking distance of the Ruins of St Paul, so it wasn’t hard to zero in.)
Indeed. I tried again and began following road (my house rule being not to look up signs, just people, vehicles, buildings, etc…although you often can’t avoid reading one). I “visited” some really nice landscape and villages, but also some incredibly boring places (Remind me not to ever visit North Dakota that by the way I mistook for Poland. Who would have thought that North Dakotans drive mini cars?)
Yes, you’re right! I had read this thread, but didn’t connect the dots. Indeed the only “exotic” places I saw (Botswana, Paraguay) are covered by Google Street according to the map.
So the spots are probably actually completely random just all situated in the limited part of the world covered by Google Street View. I had assumed they were picked by players hence that the distribution was related to the location of users (supposing that they would often pick a spot close to home). When I think of it, there was many things hinting at that not being the case (rarity of urban areas or villages, for instance).
OK, that was amusing. In the first four rounds, I got two different South African locations (and got them both pretty close). In the fifth round, I managed to find a sign that said “Johannesburg”, sighed, said “Not again, but I’m not going to go poking around to find exactly where that is”, and just plunked the marker in the middle of the city of Johannesburg, figuring I’d at least get the right country. Nope, that one was in the American southwest.
I had never heard of this game before this thread. I turned to show my wife how dumb it seemed to me.
“look at this honey, how is anyone supposed to know where this is??”
“That’s the restaurant we passed when we visited Charleston last week”
“Really??”
She was only 13km off. What are the odds?? Neither of us had ever been to Charleston before last week! We didn’t even eat there, she just remembered passing it on the road!
I’ve gotten within meters a few times. If they plunk you down in front of a sign that says this way to Namibia, that way to Springbok and you’re within sight of the border crossing, it isn’t too hard to figure out that you’re on the main road between Springbok, South Africa, and Namibia and that you’re just south of the border.
I once got a shot of a ferry landing. That’s good, I know I’m by the sea. There was a small sign with what looked like English, French, and other flags with writing after them, but it was too small to read. That narrowed it down to somewhere in Europe. I clicked around a bit until I see a sign that clearly reads “Welcommen till [somethings]holm!” Awesome, this is Norway. I went to zoom in on the Norwegian coast. The wheel on my mouse was malfunctioning at the time, so I zoomed way the hell in to a spot on Norway’s east coast. And I see the town, with a ferry route leading to it. I was 0.034 km off. Thirty-four meters, all because of a broken mouse.
Whenever I get a spot like that and guess Australia, it’s actually South Africa. When I guess South Africa, it’s actually Australia. Those places look way too similar.