Behold the World

GeoGuessr is my new favorite eSport

For a while I’ve been playing (but mostly watching) GeoGuessr, the game where you are shown a random image from Google Street View and try to identify its location. Last week I learned that GeoGuessr has been given the full eSports treatment. I watched the Americas Division Finals of the GeoGuessr World Cup. And let me tell you people, I’m a believer.

I love when games are too simple to work, but work anyway, and GeoGuessr is fun in exactly this surprising way. It’s a game of pure skill, there’s very little in the way of player interaction or strategic decision making. Although, as we know, sometimes when you have very little of a thing you end up magnifying its influence, and different players’ move/search and clock-management strategies are an exciting aspect of the competition. But for the most part it is, like Golf, more of a side-by-side comparison than a head-to-head confrontation.

Like SET, GeoGuessr is a game about perception, about zooming into the first step of the OODA Loop and discovering that there is already another tiny loop inside there, waiting to take you for a ride. GeoGuessr is about quickly extracting information from data in this one, precisely-defined domain, and a big part of the fun is seeing how good the players are at it. They can glance at what looks to me like a generic, non-descript scene — a stretch of road, a distant hill, a few scrubby trees — and immediately pinpoint its location. It looks like magic. Watching people do impossible things with miraculous ease is a big part of all sports. Here what they’re doing is strangely familiar (looking at pictures on the internet, just like us) and deeply primal (looking at the world and trying to make sense of it, as we’ve always done).

It looks like magic, but if you watch a good player stream the game while talking through their thought process you can learn about all of the subtle vectors of meaning that feed into their uncanny intuition — the way different parts of the world vary in road markings, vegetation, signage, terrain, and architecture. When talking about these clues, players use the gamer term for the current consensus regarding a game’s optimal strategies: “meta”. GeoGuessr has “car meta”, “bollard meta”, “pole meta”, and so on, each one it’s own little dense pocket of Pokémon knowledge hidden behind the mundane surface of the world, waiting to be studied and applied.

Like Jeopardy, GeoGuessr is a game where, while watching, it’s natural, effortless, almost unavoidable to play along. When the image pops up we can’t help but try to place it, and sometimes we’re right! And, as we encounter example after example, and absorb the techniques of the expert players we are watching, our results gradually improve. This is true, to a degree, for all games. But it is far more true of GeoGuessr than, for example, League of Legends or Valorant, because the thing we’re doing when we mentally play along with GeoGuessr is actually playing the actual game.

One of the things I love about GeoGuessr is the images themselves. There’s something incredibly beautiful about seeing the world this way, as a series of random snapshots of ordinary places. Not the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal or Big Ben, but a quiet suburban street in a Paris suburb, a pile of bricks next to a barbed wire fence on the outskirts of Uttar Pradesh, a cellphone repair shop in Tourquay. Each place stubbornly full of little details that make it unique. The world is so immense. You could study the world for a million years and never learn all its secrets. Just like Chess.

Stephen Shore - US 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973

US 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, in Google Street View

“But Frank,” I hear you say, “what does all this have to do with AI? Aren’t you contractually obligated to make everything about AI somehow?”

Well, first of all, it’s not nice to be sarcastic. But you’re not wrong. I can’t help but see, in GeoGuessr, the quintessential example of the world as data. The world made digital, dissolved into a vast ocean of numbers, so that we can train on it, discover the hidden patterns that give it structure, and reassemble it into a new kind of space. From one direction we struggle to build synthetic minds that contain a reliable world model. Simultaneously, from the other direction, we want to feel what its like to model the world like a learning machine in an adversarial network, to fine-tune our minds to its latent frequencies, to become cosmopolitan globetrotters without leaving our computers.

GeoGuessr was invented in 2013 by a Swedish coder named Anton Wallén, and over the past decade has steadily grown from an amusing novelty into a serious game with a dedicated community of players, some of whom (like the supremely likable Tom Davies aka GeoWizard) have built tiny media empires around the game. When he’s not playing GeoGuessr, Tom invents crazy, real-world challenges for himself, like attempting to trek across countries in a straight line. He also attempts to pinpoint the location of photos sent in by viewers, scouring them for clues and then using all the resources of the internet to reverse-engineer their position.

Inventing ridiculous problems is what games do best. GeoGuessr is an example of games growing like moss on the newly exposed surfaces created by the internet as it carves up the world into information. How good are you at seeing and navigating the world through these new tools, at wayfinding in this hybrid realm? How good are you at search? At database orienteering? At prompt engineering? These skills are too important to teach in school, but games can’t help themselves, and rush in to fill the void. See, for example, this guy, who hunts down sports broadcasts glimpsed in the background of movies and TV shows:

@noproblemgamblerReplying to @kurtisflo This is the most blind research i have ever done in a video #baseball #ncaa

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GeoGuessr is the crowning jewel of this emerging genre, and I’m happy to see this free browser game, this great-grandchild of Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego, given the full on, high-pressure eSports razzle dazzle. The hype is real.

“My heart is so small it's almost invisible. How can You place
such big sorrows in it?”

"Look," He answered, “your eyes are even smaller, yet they behold the world.”

-Rumi