Where am I? Gaming whizzes put geography on the map
STOCKHOLM—The world’s best gamers who can identify a location anywhere in the world after seeing an image in less than a second face off on Saturday in a world championship in Stockholm. A picture of a sunny paved road appears on a computer screen, bordered by trees and bushes. A red dirt road crosses the paved road, in what appears to be a tropical landscape. “We’re going to be in Indonesia because of the sticker on this pole,” Trevor Rainbolt of the United States tells Agence France-Presse (AFP). He clicks on the map and selects what appears to be a random location in Indonesia. Bingo—he’s just 88 kilometers (55 miles) from the actual spot. Rainbolt, a fast-talking computer geek, is one of the biggest stars in the GeoGuessr game community for his uncanny ability to determine the location of a Google Maps picture in a tenth of a second—less than the blink of an eye. An AFP reporter watching him play is barely able to see the image in that amount of time, much less guess the country, city or village. “It requires a lot of work and research,” Rainbolt admits. “During the pandemic I played around 18 hours a day.” Dropped somewhere Created by the Swedish trio Anton Wallen, Daniel Antell and Erland Ranvinge, GeoGuessr was born on May 10, 2013, when it was published on a popular platform for coders. The idea is simple: a player is dropped somewhere in the world on Google Maps’ Street View and has to guess where he is. He puts his cursor on the world map and clicks on the location he thinks is correct. The closer the player is to the real spot, the more points he gets. “My friend Anton was playing around with the application programming interface that Google released publicly, so he made a small game and put it on Reddit,” Antell told AFP. “Then it went viral.” On Saturday, 24 players from around the world compete in Stockholm in the first official world championship organized by GeoGuessr, with a $50,000 prize pool. Some 500 spectators are expected, according to event host Space. That’s small in the gaming world: the 2022 League of Legends world championship finals was watched by 18,000 live spectators in San Francisco and around 5 million others online. GeoGuessr has flourished into a company with sales of 200 million kronor ($18 million), with Antell
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