Friday, December 29, 2023

GeoTimeGuessr

Today we have a huge treat for fans of the popular GeoGuessr game. GeoGuessr is a geography game that takes you on a virtual trip around the world, blindfolded! It uses Google Street View to drop you in a random location somewhere on the planet, and your task is to figure out where you are based on the visual clues that you see around you.

TimeGuessr is a very similar game to GeoGuessr - except in TimeGuessr you are asked to identify the location shown in a photograph rather than the location of a Google Street View panorama. As the name 'TimeGuessr' suggests this game also comes with an additional requirement. Like Geoguessr this game requires you to guess a location by dropping a pin on an interactive map, however in TimeGuessr you are also required to guess the time, or rather the 'date' when the image was captured.

For me the extra dimension of time in TimeGuessr actually makes it more fun to play. Now as well as using the visual clues to try to determine where in the world a photograph was taken you also have to use the same visual clues to work out in what year the picture was captured. 

For example in the photograph in the screenshot above I decided that the badge on the soldier's cap looked distinctly East German. That led me to suspect that the wall behind the soldier might be the Berlin Wall. This therefore gave me a possible location (Berlin) and a date sometime before German reunification. The Berlin Wall was demolished in 1989. Unfortunately I subtracted 8 years from this date. As it turned out the photo was actually captured in the year the wall came down.

If you are a fan of Geoguessr then you will probably also like some of the map based games listed in the Maps Mania post entitled City Guesser.

If you aren't interested in the geo-guessing aspect of TimeGuessr then you might prefer to play Chronophoto, which involves identifying the years that photos were captured, without having to also identify each depicted location.

No comments:

Post a Comment