You Are Here: Travelling the Globe in Geoguessr

Game developers are constantly trying to figure out how to paint worlds that feel ornamented, lived in, and as large as real countries. The Geoguessr team found a hilariously direct solution to this problem: Setting their game in the world we already have. If ARGs like Ingress or Majestic vacuum wrap a fictional layer over our reality, Geoguessr wonders why you'd bother with that obfuscation. When you think of video game engines, you might picture Unity or Unreal. When the developers of Geoguessr had to pick an engine, they chose Google Street View. Little did the societies of the past know that when they built a monument or paved a road, they were just doing map design for Geoguessr.

The game places a bag over our head, drops us in a random location on Google Street View, and challenges us to place a pin on a map as close as possible to our landing site. The nearer we get, the higher we score.

Matches are usually played over multiple rounds and against the clock. Because Geoguessr uses Street View as its cartographer, it can't up periscope anywhere, only where the sultan of search has snapped its shutter. Here is the current state of Street View coverage, courtesy of ReAnna's Street View Map:^[1]

As you can see, there's a lot of unguessable Geo, allowing players to discount a number of potential answers before they've even loaded in. Street View has so many blind spots because there are plenty of reasons you can be exempted from the all-seeing gaze of the Google car. Firstly, Street View is, and always has been, a privacy nightmare. Google is not squeamish about collecting reams of data on people and locations and some countries aren't going to be thrilled about a publicly accessible dossier of every building. They might also look unfavourably on thousands of people on the street getting mugshotted by a foreign tech company. Some places and activities are especially sensitive to capture. What if a Street View camera photographed someone leaving a strip club or attending a controversial protest?

Originally, the service didn't blur faces and number plates, which is wild to think about in hindsight.^[2][3] The locative browser launched in May 2007, with the early coverage limited to a few US metropolises and outcry over its invasiveness only mounted as it expanded.^{[2][3][4][5][6]} Within a year, Google was browbeaten into scrambling faces and license plates.^[2] Still, there are some number plates that the algorithm misses, and even a scrambled face may be deanonymised if you have other information on its owner.

If Street View catches someone in a compromising position, not only could that be uncomfortable, but states, employers, or even other private citizens might weaponise that kompromat against the photographed individual. It's not just images that pose a risk, either. Between 2008 and 2010, Google's Street View cars hoovered up emails, passwords, and other data from passing wi-fi connections across 30 countries.^[7] The Federal Communications Commission slapped Google with a $25,000 penalty for obstructing its investigation into the spying. Later, the Appeals Court of San Francisco concluded that Google's war drive ran afoul of wiretapping laws and fined the corporation $7 million.^[7] The same financial quarter, Google made almost $15 billion in revenue, so it was hardly financially deterred from illegal data harvesting. Still, the ruling probably didn't endear it to potential host countries.

In some areas, such as Nigeria and Tunisia, the Street View vehicle was only allowed to make its rounds under the watchful eye of "follow cars". In other countries (e.g. Japan and Switzerland), governments required it to use a camera low to the ground so it couldn't peep over fences and into homes, an earlier oopsie.^[2][8] These precautions created some useful compasses for Geoguessr players: if you see a lowcam, you're in Switzerland, Lebanon, Italy, Japan, or Sri Lanka. If there's a follow car, its make and model can narrow you down to one country. You can also use these tips outside the game to tell whether you're in Switzerland or not.

For countries wary of the US, Street View could be a security concern not just because it's private mass surveillance but also because a US security agency has used tech giants for recon on foreigners before. Google was a feeler in the NSA's global data-scraping panopticon, PRISM, so it's not off the table that the US could use Street View for future snooping. This may be why there's no Street View in the US-sanctioned Venezuela and only limited urban coverage in China.^[1][9] If you're playing Geoguessr and it looks like you're in China, you're probably in Taiwan. It may also be that Google wouldn't feel particularly safe mapping North Korea. Although, there is a lot more of Russia in the database than you might expect.^[1]

Other countries could just be a poor return on investment. Most of Africa is missing from Street View's "world" map, and there's a correlation between countries going invisible and having a poverty of internet infrastructure. If a nation can't connect reliably to Street View, Google may write them off as a liability. This lack of connectivity can also dovetail with the problem that there are plenty of places on the planet that are highly remote. The western and eastern portions of Australia run blue with data trails, but the middle of the country has gone unrecorded. Western and southern Russia are known by every Geoguessr player, but there is no Siberia. A plausible explanation is that those mountains, desert, and jungle see little footfall while also being a pain in the ass to drive out to, so Google didn't consider them worth the effort to image.

When their developers do find a haven that's close to civilisation, has hardy internet coverage, and where the local government will give them permission to film, they might not always have roads. There's a whole life out there that is not integrated into the great lattice of asphalt and dirt. That's a frustration for Street View as its library is built on rapid transport of a camera, and efficient transport on land requires roads. The service does feature some panoramas taken by pedestrians with voyeuristic robots strapped to their backs. In my experience, these photographers don't stray far from a few major landmarks.

The bottom line is that Geoguessr is not primarily a game of exploring Earth; it's a game about exploring Earth's streets, highways, and byways: the sleepy residential avenues and the buzzing A-roads heavy with juggernauts. I've seen cities with white hieroglyphs at every junction and villages where cinnamon dust blows into cuboid bungalows, but wherever I go, there are roads. The ubiquity of the road has shaped the Geoguessr fandom's strategies: the "meta". "Meta" doesn't mean the same thing in Geoguessr as it does in other games. The word typically refers to the set of tactics deemed to be most popular in a game based on the current abilities available to players, the balance of the systems, and the likely behaviour of opponents. In Geoguessr, meta is any clue about where you are that doesn't derive from reading signs or prior familiarity with the location. Meta is knowledge of street markings, bollards, sign designs, utility poles, foliage, soil composition, written language, local dress, the position of the Sun, number plates, camera quality, and more. A player may find themselves through one meta indicator or a combination of them.

Knowing you're in Dubai because you saw the Burj Khalifa or that you're in Lyon because you read "Lyon" in a business address is not employing meta. Employing meta would be inferring that you're in Iceland because there are short yellow poles along the sides of the road, or in the Philippines because there are smoking tuk-tuks and everyone's driving on the right. Memorising every square foot of Street View is not possible, so meta is the only viable curriculum for someone growing their Geoguessr lobe. Even looking down at your car ("car meta") can yield valuable information because Google photographed different countries with different vehicles. Geoguessr is intended to be an exercise in identifying your surroundings, not your automobile, so some players feel icky when drawing on car meta, but every professional Geoguessr player knows their black Samoan truck from their Mongolian tent trundler.

Take a second to stare at what a weird set of skills Geoguessr asks for for a video game. You won't catch The Last of Us quizzing you on whether that's an Italian or a Spanish number plate, or Guilty Gear checking whether you know the difference between Tamil and Tegulu. Geoguessr is the environment as an exam. Rather than the space acting as barriers and bulldozers in problem-solving exercises, it is there to be recognised by the viewer.

Its levels further pry themselves from the skeleton of conventional level design. A game's stages are typically both the test and the study materials, but Geoguessr's are mostly just the test. In Zaxxon, I can learn how to destroy spaceships from my dogfights with them. In Viewfinder, the puzzles I solve in one level will teach me about common puzzle elements in another. Black Myth: Wukong is a lesson on how to play Black Myth: Wukong. But Geoguessr is played in the real world, and the real world wasn't designed with readability or a difficulty slope in mind. Consequently, any serious Geoguessr player must study materials outside the website and is going to encounter a Himalayan learning curve.

In the softly-padded campaign mode, you can earn flashcards to familiarise yourself with the markings of each nation. I love the idea of information as a gameplay reward, but the flow of that information is so slight, I want to call a plumber. You'll correctly guess five locations and get a study pack that tells you that if you see the Canadian flag and ".ca" in a web address, you're in Canada. No kidding. You can be level 200 in the campaign, but if you switch to Geoguessr Classic (the version most people know as Geoguessr), you'll be chewed up and spat out. To be ready for life on the road, you best be watching YouTube videos from zi8gzag and RAINBOLT, and you are well-advised to read Plonk It or Geometas. Even in the last twelve months, there has been sizable innovation in how Geoguessr is learned.

trausi is a Geoguessr maven who found that when they taught their friends hints to identify each country, those friends would forget the clues by the time the relevant locations rolled around next. To reinforce that knowledge, trausi collaborated with some friends on the Learnable Meta script and maps. Learnable Meta releases the player near a tracer for their current location, and after the visitor guesses where they touched down, the plugin will highlight the clue they were meant to notice, like so:^[10][11]

trausi and Plurk launched their guide in August 2024, and overnight, Learnable Meta became an invaluable tutor for bedroom hikers, with its maps rocketing to the top of the "Most Played" each month.^[10][11]

Geoguessr is more intelligible with the Learnable Meta extension than without, but when I use it, I find myself encountering the same amnesia it was written to cure. All games have prompts that we're meant to meet with certain actions, whether those prompts are enemies that are so powerful we might want to evade them or seals that require a certain spell to pierce. After first teaching us these primers, a game will cycle them around with a regularity that fortifies our knowledge of them. If we encounter cues too frequently, we won't have enough time for our memory of them to fade, and there's no challenge in recalling the correct action. If the prompts are too far apart, then we can't be expected to remember how we're meant to react to them. Games often start with the spaces in between prompts being small, and make the gaps bigger as you familiarise yourself with the indicators.

In Geoguessr, the designer does not sequence the order in which we encounter cues. Remember, our spawn location is random, meaning our encounters might not be timed to reinforce our knowledge of the hints at that location. I could learn about the Swedish zebra crossing signs on one round, but by pure chance, won't see the same crossing sign for another fifty rounds, by which time the clue has floated from my mind like a hot air balloon. Games also generally like loud prompts that cannot be mistaken for each other. In Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, enemies that can wipe the floor with us have red names, while comparative munchkins have grey names. In Sable, ledges that lead towards quest objectives have ivy hanging from them, but other ledges have no foliage. You can't get these cues mixed up, but in Geoguessr, prompts can be similar enough that they're easily confused. To repeat myself, our world wasn't designed to clearly telegraph solutions to video game players. One bollard or sign might differ from another by only a dab of paint or tapering end.

Let me describe some location markers and the stops they're native to. If you see a flat white roadside post with a red square on the front and no square on the back, you're in Turkey, but if you see a white roadside post with a red band wrapped around the top but a white gap in the back, that's New Zealand. Neither of these bollards is to be confused with their Australian cousins that have a red reflector on the front and a white reflector on the back.

In other bollard bother, both Germany and Luxembourg's posts wear a black diagonal sash, have two round white reflectors on the obverse, and sport a rectangular reflector on the reverse. However, the rectangular reflectors on the German installations are held on with two screws, whereas Luxembourg's are secured with three. If you're in Latin America and there's an indented utility pole with a few supports in the indent, you're in Chile, but if you see the same pole but with more indents, you're in Brazil. If memorising all that sounds like no sweat, check out this document on recognising Japanese power company plates.

I was left bereft by these road infrastructures that appeared to blur into each other, then three words kissed my ear like angel's breath: "Hungary holey pole". "Hungary holey pole" is what Learnable Meta calls the utility poles in Hungary because they have holes in them. Just to screw you over, so do the utility poles in Poland and Romania. Yet, with the phrase "Hungary holey pole", the Meta script was, for once, not giving me another blurry JPEG of a car antenna or road marking to commit to memory. It gave me a mnemonic, and that made me realise how tight a knot mnemonics could be between a Geoguessr clue and a location. Perhaps I'll never get eidetic about all those Japanese electrical company plaques or what the taxis look like in each European capital, but I will never forget Hungary holey pole. So, partly inspired by the tricks used in memory competitions, I started coming up with my own mental pictures and funny names for the hints.

There's "Ukraine with the red car", and I know Mexico has bollards with the bands at the bottom because it's the country at the bottom of the US. The circle in the Portuguese "No Hunting" sign is the "port" in Portugal, and I remember the Street View car in Qatar is silver because of all the futuristic public works projects there. I'll make a list of all my mental shortcuts if there's demand or I feel like it. For whatever reason, sometimes I don't need the mnemonics. I can remember the stripey Peruvian sign supports or the yellow Dutch number plates without additional prompting, although other times, a mnemonic's not enough for me to save prompts to my mental hard disc. The Croatian bollard is a near-clone of the eastern Russian bollard, such that any shorthand I came up with for one would also apply for the other. Other clues, I can't summon any connection between. How do I remember that blue agave mostly grows in Jalisco, Mexico, or that Indonesian roads always have white outer lines?

Even with these questions unanswered, Geoguessr remains rewarding. It's rewarding because it's intellectually empowering, it teaches me geography, and because I get to experience places I never knew existed, but it's also a gift because it bends space around me. The larger an area is, the more need we have for a map of it. My whole life, I've loved maps because they can take an expanse of any scale and make it something I can hold in my hands and pore over for hours. But the downside of this downsizing is that it makes the world feel smaller.

Geoguessr reasserts the Earth's planetary scale. Where two highways or two streets in the same country may have looked identical to you previously, once you've learned Geoguessr, you see the vegetation or the guard rails that set them apart. Where you might not have known your Botswana from your Eswatini before, now each has a vibe to you because you've learned about their different grasses. There are no longer a few general ways somewhere in the world can look, and therefore, only a few places to safari. We can distinguish thousands of locations on this boundless globe. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Street View Map by ReAnna (Date Unknown, Accessed July 5, 2025), Street View Map.
2. Google Street Views [sic] Faces Privacy Critics in Japan and Greece by Ian Paul (May 13, 2009), PCWorld.
3. Google's Street View may violate Canadian Privacy Laws by Allan Fogul (November 13, 2007), York University.
4. Google Maps Street View celebrates its 10th birthday by Dan Ackerman (May 30, 2017), CNET.
5. New Google Street Scenes - Serious Privacy Problems by Nicole A. Ozer (May 31, 2007), ACLU.
6. Google Maps: An Invasion of Privacy? by S. James Snyder (June 12, 2007), TIME.
7. Google faces Streetview wi-fi snooping action by BBC Staff (September 11, 2013), BBC.
8. Swiss Court Orders Modifications to Google Street View by Kevin J. O'Brien (June 8, 2012), The New York Times. Current Street View images of Switzerland confirm that Google complied with the Swiss court's decision.
9. Venezuela condemns new US and European sanctions by Reuters Staff (January 11, 2025), Reuters.
10. Made a map to make learning "metas" easier. by trausi (August 30, 2024), Reddit.
11. Introducing A Learnable Meta World maps by trausi (2024), LearnableMeta.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.