Picture a specific image from Google Street View. You’re going to try to guess exactly where in the world the photo was taken. The cloudless sky and desert landscape indicate somewhere hot. The grey road stretches far ahead of you with few defining characteristics. There are telegraph wires to the left of the road, above some short trees. You can zoom into the photo. You can pan around. You can’t, however, zoom out for added context. Can you guess? Oh, and you had one minute. Now you have about 30 seconds. In a 450-seat arena in Stockholm, one 31-year-old Dutch man doesn’t just correctly surmise that this photo was taken in Jordan; he guesses the location within 3 metres.
To the uninitiated, watching the GeoGuessr World Cup might not just sound unexciting, it might sound like a cruel and unusual form of punishment. Attending the tournament involves sitting in an arena and watching two nerds (“Everyone in this room is a nerd,” says one of the commentators confidently) sit in front of two computers and try to identify locations based on Google Street View photos. The closer you get to the exact location, the more points you get. That’s it. One nerd wins; both nerds are replaced by two different nerds. Well, call me a nerd because this simple spectacle turns out to be one of the most thrilling days of my life.
