Main Page

Go to this comic explanation

< Prev Comic #1214 (May 20, 2013)

Geoguessr

Title text: I'm not sure if you can get Epcot, but my friend just got LegoLand. He guessed California but it was the one in Denmark. Meanwhile, I'm rapidly becoming a connoisseur of unmarked dirt roads over flat, barren landscapes.

Explanation

Geoguessr is a game in which the player is given a location in Google Street View and asked to guess precisely where in the world they are, by clicking on a map of the world, based only on the 360 degree view in the Street View display.

Cueball is upset because he keeps making his guesses based on landmarks and his guesses end up being wrong because the landmark he based his guess off of was actually a replica of the real one.

Of course, from a statistical perspective, this makes sense: For every famous object, there are countless replicas, and the vast majority of famous objects (except a few notable works of art) exist in only one place in the world. Take the Statue of Liberty, for instance, which has hundreds of replicas all over the planet.

However, as the alt text alludes to, you're far more likely to find a dirt road than to find anything recognizable, since Google Street View maps roads more than anything else (hence its name).

Anyone who's ever played with Geoguessr knows, also, that seemingly helpful clues can sometimes be useless. For instance, if you recognize Japanese characters on a sign, the nation of Japan actually encompasses an enormous area, so unless you can recognize a specific region, there's no obvious place to guess where you can hope to get high points. (Unlike somewhere like England, where guessing London is guaranteed to put you within reasonable distance from a global perspective.) Legoland is a good example of this: If you can't tell if you're in Denmark or California, it's not like you can just guess halfway between and do well.

Transcript