Let’s game!

WEEK 46

Online gaming is a foreign land to me. Even thinking about gaming, I become that person who’s never left her country, unsure about where to go and how long it will take to get there, what to pack, how to spend my time and whether I’ll like the locals. The journey ends up being more than I want to take on, so I stay put IRL.

Why the aversion? It’s curious because games were everywhere in childhood. Each weekend, my family spent hours driving to our mountain home, our noses stuck in Auto Bingo. I remember stacks of board games, from my youngest days playing Chutes and Ladders and the Game of Life to Othello and Scrabble, even Monopoly and backgammon filled many rainy days — and who didn’t love Clue? Outside, we lost track of time acting out imaginary stories, the enormous granite rocks of our mountain backyard becoming the rooms of pretend houses. Inside, we hung with friends in our garage filled with arcade games including our very own pachinko machine, foosball table and pinball machine — even a first-year Atari pong console.

My problem, I’ve concluded, isn’t getting lost inside a game. It’s doing it at the computer. My three decades of work life have been defined by sitting in front of a computer. The computer screen has always signaled work. Anything not done on a computer is most likely not work.

Then, this happened: Stuck at home on week whatever-it-is, I ran out of books, and the libraries and bookstores are, of course, shuttered. Adding to the misery of no paper in the house, our mail has gone missing (for five weeks now), which means no escaping with my travel and outdoor adventure magazines.

I’m left with the realization that my screen is the only way to get out. It’s time to visit my first online game.

As for where to go, the answer fell into my lap: GeoGuessr. To play, you’re dropped into random locations around the world through Google Street View and have to mark (guess) your coordinates on a zoomable map.

Talk about a game custom-built for me. First, I’m a human GPS – you can deposit me anywhere I’ve been before and I’ll find my way back to places, sans map, with remarkable accuracy. It’s my superpower. Next, my brain is filled with mostly useless proper nouns, things like the names of buildings, restaurants, streets, highways, authors, parks, ski resorts, museums. If that’s not nerdy enough, for decades I’ve collected paper clippings of places to visit, organized in a library by continent and country.

How hard could this game be?

The GeoGuessrs crushed me with their speed and precision.

After signing up and looking around, I decided to build my confidence starting with Famous Places. It seemed gauche to barge in with an unproven persona.

I hit play and was immediately transported to a courtyard enclosed on all sides by stone buildings, several stories high. There were puddles on the ground from a recent rain, and people milled about in shorts and sneakers. Summer tourists, I figured. I spun around and zoomed in on what looked like a museum exhibit banner, with Slavic script unknown to me. After spending too much time in the courtyard, I click-walked out the gate and onto a cobblestone path, packed with people and cafes near a lovely bridge. The place looked familiar. Prague, I thought, and decided to make a guess. I found the flat map in the corner of the game screen, zoomed to Europe, found the Czech Republic and put my little + marker on the word Prague. Oops. 5 miles off the target. Lesson one: you win the most points by marking the exact spot.

My screen then filled with the Flatiron building. Score! I zoomed into North America, then New York City, then to Fifth Avenue and 23^rd Street and positioned my guessr on the spot where I thought the photo was taken. I landed a couple hundred feet from the mark. Not bad — and I had moved quickly — but I wanted to do better.

Next, I was surrounded by palm trees, sand and blue sky, standing in front of The Pelican. Amazingly, I’ve had breakfast in that café in Miami Beach. Although that was 13 years ago, I remembered it was near 8^th street on Ocean Drive. To confirm, I took a walk in Street View to the next corner, then positioned my geo marker and nailed it. A perfect score.

Round number four stumped me. I knew immediately I was standing on The Great Wall of China but where exactly? Having visited (more than 25 years ago), my hunch was the section north of Beijing, but when I zoomed in on the flat map, all the writing was in Chinese. My guess landed about 65 miles too far east.

My inaugural tour ended at the backside of Cristo Redentor atop Corcovado mountain, overlooking Rio de Janeiro. I’ve stood there, too, so for me, this was a layup, and I added another perfect round.

So, with a modest amount of swagger — and after a second game visiting the Arc de Triomphe, Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, Copenhagen and the Roman Colosseum — I signed up for the PRO trial.

Then it got interesting. I joined my fellow GeoGuessrs for the Daily Challenge, with three-minutes per round on the clock.

Oh my. I was dropped into nothingness:

For clues to our whereabouts, GeoGuessrs look at vegetation, wildlife, what people are wearing, street signs, building construction, language on the side of delivery trucks, all the things you’d expect. Here, I moved up and down the roads I could find, for miles and miles. I ate up my three minutes without a guess. I’ve since learned that picking any spot on the map is better than none. But how 10 people got a perfect score this round is mystifying. It turned out to be a road in Saskatchewan, Canada. [And no, the SK-64 wasn’t on the game map, though it wouldn’t have helped me.]

Round two put me in a nondescript parking lot:

I quickly spun around and found myself in a suburban town with American flags on porches. I found a high-school track field with a sign for St. James but needed something to help identify the state. Just as the timer ran out, I put my marker in the center north of the U.S. (based on trees and architecture) and, shockingly, landed 280 miles away from St. James, Minnesota.

For the next three games, I knew I had to move quickly to gather clues (three minutes is a snap of the fingers), and unless I knew the spot on sight, my goal was to make an educated guess and not embarrass myself any further on the leaderboard.

Here’s the play-by-play.

For this spot below, my first guess was somewhere in Southeast Asia, and after finding a building that said PhilHealth, along with many signs in English, I put my marker on the Philippines near Manila but was 337 miles too far north in the country. Actual location, the Western Visayas.

On this next map, I toured up and down many streets, eventually going by Transylvania Bank. I then found a road sign (written in the local language), indicating that Bucharest was 500 km away. With proper nouns and geography to the rescue, I settled on Romania, and amazingly (to me), marked the spot within 18 miles.

For my final round, I imagined myself somewhere in Africa, based on the vegetation, shops, motorbikes and the way people dressed. But it’s a big continent! Where was I? I came across a sign for the Uganda Reptile Museum (a place not stored in my mental filing cabinet), and with time running out, I zoomed to Uganda on the flat map, picked the capital of Kampala and held my breath. 16 miles off target.

Let’s be clear: My first competitive showing was a disaster, and I won’t publish my score. Much to my surprise, more than 25 people got a near-perfect score on the leaderboard. Who are they, I wondered, as I moused over their tiny thumbnail photos and mostly male names? I want to believe they’re not cheating by typing clues into a search bar on another browser tab. I want to believe these GeoGuessr Pros sit at home, unshowered, tethered to their devices, roaming the earth in Street View.

The question now is whether I’ll keep gaming. I admit, it was exciting to be dropped randomly into an unknown place from my perch at the dining table, walking through far-away neighborhoods and landscapes. Playing game after game, a reality non-reality started to mess with me.

But in my heart, I believe I’ll pick the adventure travel books and magazines over a screen. That is, until I can go out in the world again.