Where in the USA is this? | Hacker News Reader

Where in the USA is this?

pudding.cool

476 pointschippy231 comments

The most interesting part of this to me is the UX feedback from the comments here.

Many people, myself included, say they had no idea at first that the photos were all meant to be from the same location, even though the very first sentence of the instructions was "There are five photos from the same place."

I'm pretty sure I read the instructions, I guess that just didn't register? An opportunity to reflect on how hard it can be to properly communicate with users, I guess.

Yep. I was distracted by the pretty colors I guess, because I made exactly the same error. Got a little frustrated and couldn't see the attraction of the game until I saw in the comments that all the pictures are in the same location.

Oh, I didn't even realize that until I read your comment. I got a lucky first guess and thought "wow, I'm good at this," and then they just kept getting worse, lol.

I guess it's because that information is dropped at the wrong time, because right after that you first have to spend time on figuring out how the weird UI works so you can actually make your guess. Why does the map have to be hidden behind a button, and why does it have to cover the picture? There is so much wasted space on the screen, why not use it to show both at the same time?

The siren song of a mobile-first UI

The UI is pretty bad. I have a nice 27" monitor, yet they constrain the entire game to a tiny 5" wide column down the length of my browser window. Would be great if web designers would stop imagining that I'm browsing the web with a tiny portrait phone screen.

They just stopped imagining that I’m browsing on a 15” screen!

But conversely, if you are designing a website where I will likely need to consult information or enter information whilst also using another site, it'd be great if your site could be accessed in a 'tall-and-thin' format.

One of the most effective ways I have found to work is having windows open on the same monitor next to each other in a vertical tiling - almost as if they were two physical documents.

I have a context for a fair number of mobile games. The UI felt fairly intuitive to me.

Was it great? No. But I also didn't have to spend any time figuring anything put.

Context matters the most.

The issue is they're clearly not all from the same place, so the instruction can't really register. They were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other, but that doesn't mean they were taken from the same place. In today’s one was aerial while another was indoors — not the same place!

The instructions would be better if they read “the five photos were taken at different times, but were all taken within a few hundred feet of each other”.

Or “the five photos were all taken in the same town/city”. Now I know the scale I’m looking for.

Two of today's photos are from OUTSIDE the final "0 miles" radius.

I dunno, they were taken at different times too, so none of them were within thousands of miles of each other relative to the galactic core. So that sentence is clearly not true either. "from the same place", place ~ region or as easily place ~ tripod position. Brevity and clarity are in tension with each other. Gotta decide where on the pareto front you want to be.

The instructions do say:

> Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.

So the pictures are all within 53,000 feet of each other (10 miles). Note that the random location is just some point, and probably not in a town or city.

My phone does not show those instructions. Firefox on iPhone mini 12.

Instructions do not show up again after the first visit. Try with incognito mode.

You are correct.

Place does have many meanings, and in the context of playing a game, there's always room for playing with stuff like that. They could be taken from the exact same geographical coordinates, the same city, the same state. The photos could've all been grabbed from the same website or the place could've been "by a river", whether that's the Monongahela River or the Colorado River.

OTOH I understood the instructions immediately. This is a fundamental issue in UX. Some users will know right away and others will not. Maybe a better sentence structure? Maybe something like "Guess the 1 location where all these photos were taken" (?)

From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway. So its possible that an even better UX is one where the user figures out what they can do through intuition rather than reading.

> From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway.

This fascinated me ~90s computer gaming. There were clear camps of "people who always read the manual" and "people who never never read the manual."

for some, reading the manual was also fun. For most, reading the manual was an admission of failure.

Manuals in the 90s were sometimes actually fun. I still occasionally reminisce about that time in primary school, when one of the classmates bought (well, his parents did, I suppose) an original, boxed copy of StarCraft. He used to briefly lend the CD, and at some point copies of the CD started circulating, and he would just share the CD key with a few people - but in between, he lent me the manual.

I think I was the only one who really cared about it. I've had it for months, I think. Read it cover to cover more times than I could count. Pretty much memorized every bit of lore and trivia there was in it - and there was quite a lot. The manual itself was a small booklet, with a couple pages of backstory for each of the playable species, plus a lot of extra world-building details about individual units, buildings and planets. So even as I didn't have access to the game, my own imagination built a whole world and infinite stories out of what some would consider "filler content". But this filler content made me care, and eventually shell out my pocket money for Brood War, and later on, money from my first full-time job on the collector's edition of StarCraft II.

That SC manual came probably at the tail end of the era where the publishers put any kind of effort into manuals. Case in point: SC:BW came with just a tiny booklet with about equal split between lore/context, instructions for the new and changed game aspects, and legal/credits. SC II came... well, I don't know with, by that time Blizzard stopped caring about the game story anyway.

(Oh, and speaking of warm memories of computer manuals in the 90s, I have a special place in my heart for the big, heavy, couple hundred pages long manual to Word 6.0 (not 100% sure about the exact version), and earlier, for the interactive self-training application that came included with Windows 3.11 - that one taught me how to use the mouse!)

I fondly remember the manuals for Homeworld 1 and Homeworld Cataclysm. More than a hundred pages each, the second contains extensive in-universe descriptions of the units, talking about dispenser jamming issues in the minelayer corvettes and the odd center of gravity on the interceptor fighter due to its offset gun. Complete fluff, of course, with zero impact on gameplay. Perfect nerd bait, like those giant books of exploded diagrams of Star Wars ships that specified the wattage and manufacturer of each turbolaser battery on the Death Star. https://www.moddb.com/games/homeworld-cataclysm/downloads/ho...

More interesting in retrospect, the first manual contained extensive descriptions of kiith clans. They go on for dozens of pages, and don't show up in the game's actual story at all. Someone spent serious effort writing them. Why? Left over from an earlier version of the game pitch where the player would have to manage relations between competing groups on the mothership? https://sierrachest.com/gfx/games/Homeworld/box/manual.pdf

Thanks for the link; I played the OG Homeworld a bit, but got it IIRC from one of those game magazines with CDs, and if there was a copy of the manual there, it must have been digital, and I didn't notice.

Skimming from the dozens of pages I would love to have read back then, I think this may be the case of writers creating a detailed setting for the game early on - only fraction of it could become part of the gameplay, but presumably designers and writers were using it as a reference. And, come release time, it didn't hurt to include the world-building bits - it might just get some players to enjoy the game more (I know it would've had this effect on me), while the alternative, back then, was for those details to never see the light of day.

And/or maybe they hoped to make some follow-up games, or tie-in novels, etc. - then including those details was both important to solidify the fictional universe, and would drive some secondary sales for the game itself.

Also interesting that if you read the original Starcraft manual, you'd notice that there were massive retcons as early as Brood War (particularly with the Terrans).

Some board games come with pretty hefty manuals, still. Twilight Imperium comes with a whole separate lore booklet that has nothing to do with playing the game.

Some old-school 80s and 90s games used manuals as form of copy protection. I distinctly remember parts of "Day of the Tentacle" where the game would ask you to enter a word or phrase from the manual...and if you didn't have it (because you copied the disk and not the manual), then you couldn't move forward.

Pretty interesting idea that eschewed technological tricks to prevent copying.

DoTT copy protection involved balancing the portable battery's chemicals. Copying a word or phrase feels off brand for a LucasArts game, that was more of a Sierra thing.

Which specific version do you distinctly remember?

You're right, I do remember the battery challenge now. I was possibly confusing a similar tactic from a Sierra game (which I also played my fair share of). Bear in mind, this was over thirty years ago - it's amazing how our memories can take on new shapes over time.

This exists everywhere. People who knows their stuff read the manual, those who don't didn't.

Especially common are the people who get others to read the manual for them and answer all their questions, because they themselves obviously have no time to be reading them but more than enough time to grab some unfortunate sod to do so.

If you are fascinated by those game manuals, Tunic is exactly the right game for you.

As a designer, I can assure you that 90+% of computer users will never read a line of actual software documentation in their entire lives. It's not because they're lazy, it's because they don't have to. In many cases it doesn't even exist. The FOSS community almost universally blames marketing and advertising for the dominance of commercial consumer-level software, but that doesn't hold a candle to the experience upgrade of using professionally designed software. To people with a mental model of the way computers function, the differences seem trivial, or even annoying. To everybody else, they're essential. To a developer, an interface is the way users interact with the application. To everybody else, the interface is the application.

It seems to me like some of the most successful commercial software virtually requires either reading the documentation, or doing some sort of training

Or being taught informally by a colleague or a friend. I am curious which is most prevalent!

Such as?

Excel, SAP, AutoCAD, Photoshop, and many many others. All require quite a bit of training even if you already know similar software.

I learned excel and photoshop on my own, without documentation, just figuring things out as needed. Asking a coworker "do you know how to refer to the value in another cell?" is not the same as reading documentation. Both SAP and Autocad are super domain specific, and likely used by far fewer than 1% of computer users. Even then, new CAD self-learners would almost certainly start with a newer, more intuitive CAD app to get their feet wet.

I always read hints and in-build help. This is not the case in this game. It explicitly went against the "common convention" so to say. In all location guessing games you get one try per location, and most times you don't need to read instructions if you see a different guessing site. Number 5 is also a tell and different pictures. If it was say 2 tries with different pictures, people would have suspected that something wrong. If it was 5 tries but with the same picture, also suspicious. But it literally had the same game flow from as other guessing games.

And about the instructions. Sure, it is useful to read them, but even more useful, for all humans, is to rely on the training. We don't carry around dictionaries to talk, we don't read "Introduction to Javascript" daily, we don't use UX designer guideline book to open a faucet in the bathroom. And re-training is not free, that's why so many people jumped in based on their old skill. Not based on their ignorance, but on the skill, and that's important distinction. People actually knew how to play such games, that's why they subconsciously omitted instructions.

> In all location guessing games you get one try per location

Not in tradle, for example

>From my experience, most people don't read the instructions or text notes anyway.

This happens in my life constantly when dealing with family IT problems or mentoring juniors at work (and sometimes working with seniors too!). People just do not read the output of their computers.

Part of it is laziness or some mental block, but I have observed what I call "computer untrustworthyness", and experienced it myself, even.

If you can constantly guarantee that everything work the same all the time, then there are fewer issues. However, it does not, and because computers are prone to both bugs and marketing gimmicks, it is easy to burn out on a mental model of things.

People who do read the output of their computers experiencing situations where the computer doesn't do what it says it does, can quickly burn out. Not to mention, reading only what the computer says is a good way to diagnose the wrong thing. You observe something similar when a feature or bug is exposed and the first response is "well it used to work before" - which is often (partially) true, but that does nothing to explain why it doesn't work or did work.

Then there is social and linguistic familiarty (often iconographic). It's telling that the way the IQ test is most flawed is that it scores those with more cultural familiarity higher - things that seem "easy" may only be so because of a certain familiarity, with where things are commonly placed, common functionality, etc.

And again, as UX designers destroy these foundations in the hopes of making their UIs "easier", it only makes things more difficult, not less, to understand.

I once wrote a final exam for a linear algebra course with a section "all the following are false, explain why." I did it to make it easier than a T/F, but it was unintentionally devious. So many students said some of them were true anyway and tried to prove them...

I think some crowd that come to this come from geoguesser which will have 5 locations in a row.

Yeah. It's probably mostly just geoguesser/not-geoguesser :)

Unfortunately, that sucks even more from a UX design perspective, since it means even if you absolutely nail the instructions you need to know all of the surrounding context and find a way to address it.

added to the more explicite sentence, maybe just connect the dots on the map with lines so the user asks himself/herself : why are they connected and then realizes

Because there were five guesses, I thought they would be five different photos from five different geographic locations

Wordle is similar though and doesn't seem to suffer from this ambiguity. Is it because the ui feedback from Wordle makes it more clear you're guessing the same word? I thought it was pretty clear here with the distance.

Obviously Wordle is uninteresting if you're only allowed one guess.

This game reminds me very much of chronophoto (https://www.chronophoto.app/game.html), which prompts with photos from different years, and so I was expecting it to work more like that.

You think that's bad. I guessed in three, after realizing the first two photos had the name of the town in them!

If you click the question mark, you get the help page which clarifies the data used:

> ~500,000 geo-tagged images from Wikimedia Commons. Each day, a random location is generated, along with five photos within five miles.

In a remote area, there will likely only be a few notable landmarks nearby so you can expect to see many pictures of a single landmark. This might be why people think the pictures are supposed to of the same place.

Same boat, but lucky me I got 55 miles on the 4th photo. 5th one was 2200 miles off though.

I got 19 miles away with my first guess, the map zoomed in and I thought "that's a weird bug", zoomed it out, and then proceeded to guess other guesses that were hundreds of miles away. Interesting concept, but poorly communicated.

> Interesting concept, but poorly communicated.

It was communicated in the very first sentence of the instructions. It's just that both you and me failed to read the instructions. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

This feels like morality vs outcomes reasoning.

“Morally”, no we don’t. (Me included.)

Say, if you are a games designer and want to get the message across, then you can start A/B testing ways to get your point (pun mostly not intended) across more effectively.

One of the major ways this point is driven home in real life is through... letting the person fail in their task, suffer the consequences, and hopefully remember to read the goddamn manual the next time. Of course then there's a failure mode of e.g. bureaucracy, where people know everything is in the "manual" somewhere, they just don't trust themselves to understand it.

In this case though it's "you failed! try again tomorrow!" (because it's a daily thing). The odds I'm gonna come back tomorrow are extremely low though.

I feel something like "OK, you made your first guess, now try to get even closer! Here's another image" would have been helpful.

No, this is a design problem. The fact that so many missed it is just evidence of how subtly tricky good design is.

You’re both right—a better world emerges, when we each look towards ourselves to solve the problems we see.

That's a kind of standard answer about manuals and design, and on the one hand I understand its practicality, but on the other hand, I'm starting to have doubts - this approach may be another cause of exacerbating the very problem it's trying to work around.

That is, the more stuff is usable without reading manuals, the more people ignore the manuals - making it harder to build complex, powerful tools, and in fact creating a strong design pressure to "fisher price" your product. Overall, this trend ends up disempowering users.

I mostly agree, except this is a simple game. It should be simple to play.

If folk aren't seeing the text laid out in front of them, there are a couple tricks - demonstrate, make the instructions pictographic/difficult to dismiss.

There is a fine line between making your game accessible and providing too much instruction, but I can think of a couple visual cues that probably could have been given.

That being said I had no problem reading the intro, on the other hand I will regularly finish those long, long, long 45 minute articles that have "congratulations you made it to the bottom", and I know generally people who are great at reading much, much faster than me have little problem figuring out "techy" things, so I do think in general people just don't read enough.

Correct, this is a design problem, but no one's pointed out what the specific problem is: The "Instruction" that most people perceive is the title of this post on HackerNews.

By the time you actual visit the site you ALREADY have an idea of what it's supposed to be about, the colors draw your eyes to "Here's how you can tell your score, press here to start" and skip the fine print entirely. People MIGHT skim the "fine print" that is the actual instructions with key details, and what do you read when you skim? The first part of a paragraph/sentence to establish a subject and action. And what's the First part of that sentence? The same thing the title of this post told you.

"Oh, yeah, I already know this"

Skip to the pretty colors telling you how to score your guess and start the game.

EDIT: Also, the UI after you click through to start also assumes the user read the instructions, instead of trying to organically guide them to the same conclusions. /EDIT.

Cue so many people wondering how they could miss something laid out so clearly in front of them.

That’s a great diagnosis! Though yes I agree, that should all be moot because of the solution in your edit.

I read the instructions and I understood what was meant. How do you explain that? Humans regularly make stupid mistakes. We shouldn't dumb down the world to try to avoid it. We should encourage people to be more careful

I regularly get requests to put text or a warning on a page that’s already there.

People just aren’t good with words and will come up with all sorts of reasons they didn’t see it.

That’s not to say I’m any better, just that I get to see all the requests and excuses. Bolder, bigger, alerts, doesn’t matter.

Sometimes location and/or formatting is either bad or goes against "common convention". For example here on HN there is a mostly ok search build in. I had found it only after several years of using the site, and if I had to search for something before that, I've used google/ddg with "site:" option. Why? I guess because in 99% of all sites search is at the header, and footer contains zero useful information. I was trained that there is nothing there and so I've quite literally "didn't see" search box for a long time.

My first guess was 19 miles away and I totally thought they were in 5 different locations. I had lived in Pittsburgh for a short time and knew exactly those iron bridges were probably WV/Pittsburgh area.

My film watching history had me 100% convinced it was Madison County.

Hah, yes, I had the exact same reaction. "Looks like Pittsburgh, but not quite. Also kind of looks like Virginia... let's split the difference."

I read this post, then read the instructions, and still forgot the second photo was the same location as the first.

I started to suspect that it was the same location after the third photo. Not that the photographs themselves seemed related but that the challenge didn't feel like a cohesive "game" unless the distance was a hint (and not a score on the single attempt).

Wow. Yes. Same here.

I see it as a combination of distraction and being eager to consume something. Everything in the page (and before that, in the link title) screams “this is a game” yet Start was pressed without reading the 33-words down the bold How to play. A U issue more than UX.

My problem was the state lines. My first guess was somewhere in West Virginia, which happened to be right, but being from the west coast, I had trouble eyeballing where to click for West Virginia.

The game is great, but I'm shouting to the wind about the decline in quality of online maps. For example, I can barely see roads on Google maps any more. The lines are faint and low contrast. Zooming in doesn't help because the font remains tiny. Map makers hate middle-aged people.

If you pinch to zoom on the map the state lines show, qnd even city names start to show. But you have to zoom more than you would think.

Google Maps is also really prejudiced against railways! Maps by the Ordnance Survey (the national cartography agency of Britain) have railways indicated by a solid, thick black line - more prominent than most roads. Google Maps shows railways less visibly than a footpath!

Google maps is a crime against cartography. The two most important elements of a map are usually absent: a north arrow and a scale.

I do UX research for a complex simulation training device. We record and catalogue dozens of hours of video.

You would be amazed how many users miss key information presented to them. You’d think you can plan and predict, but they always manage to find a new and surprising way to just not get stuff.

UX testing on simplest grittiest prototypes yields the best results in my experience. The more work you put into it before showing it to users, the more irritated you will be.

Lot of us do not read instructions. Especially if it is first thing presented.

What we’re working on is more than that - it’s an interactive hardware/software device with game-mechanics. Users’ attentions shift and come in and out of focus as they become acquainted with it. There are moments when they will read an instruction, and there are moments when they will miss it.

Count me as one more person who did not realize this until after playing the full game and then coming back here to read the comments.

One more arrow in the quiver of "users don't read"

One problem is that the instructions are not visible until you click on the question mark icon (at least on mobile) so I didn't even realize there were instructions until I read your comment.

FWIW this made sense to me right away

An option would be to change the name so it communicates the goal as clearly as possible. People read it and interpret "this" as referring to a specific photo, not that the photos come from the same place.

Ah, that explains why it only showed one flag at the end - I was thinking, "but where were all the other photos from?" I totally missed that information!

Maybe if I hadn't played things like Geoguesser and was expecting it to work the same way, I would have read it a bit more carefully.

I think it's that software engineers don't know how to read what they don't write, that being instructions and documentation. I am making an assumption here on the category of those complianing about the UX, but I doubt it is far off.

yeah i also presumed that it was different locations, like geoguessr

I got 0 mi! [1]

After the first 2 I stopped attempting cities and figured the picture didn't matter, it was a game of triangulation.

Nice game, I like it, even though I've never set foot in the US.

[1] Spoilers! - https://i.imgur.com/azCWc3i.png

I tried a similar approach. I only got as close as 126 miles...

After reading your comment (but not looking at the spoiler), I attempted triangulation from the get-go.

I managed to get 60 mi away.

I think 0 mi away is very impressive. Especially since you had already used some of your attempts without initially aiming for triangulation!

Kudos to you :)

18 miles using triangulation

I must have missed the part in the instructions where all the photos are from the same place. Is that what you mean by triangulation?

They are, yeah. I didn’t realise to start with. I played a couple of older games and managed to get 0 miles on one too - though there was a hint in the second photo that got me within 12 miles and it was easier find it from there.

Yes, you can use a ruler and the scale to get closer with each guess, regardless of what the picture shows. I use the built in drawing app on Linux Mint.

Here is another attempt, with my triangulation circles written (don't judge me)

Attempt: https://i.imgur.com/Hz3c37c.png

To help others understand, This image shows that there's only two possible locations left where all the circles intersect. Because the game gives exact distance to the target the correct answer must be on the circles.

Imagine drawing a circle with a radius of your error each time you guess. After the second guess, there will be only two intersecting points. A careful third guess should tell you which of the two it is.

Ooooh I got 99 miles on guess 3 and then started guessing 2000 miles away because I assumed they would be distributed.

I managed to get 0 mi, as well. I guessed the state based on the first image and was able to rapidly narrow it down from there. Kind of cool today's happened to be in the state I was born in, yet have no memories of.

Triangulation from guesses #3 and #4 gave me the general area, but then picture #5 shows what feature to look for on the map. Got 0.5 miles.

I was off by 6 miles because the actual pin is off by six miles for the last picture.

Also, as an American, the fact that I recognized the first picture to within 50 miles makes me sad. Our bridges should not look like that, even there.

Agreed. I grew up in Pittsburgh, but even after 10 years after moving away, I immediately recognized the first picture as "somewhere in West Virginia" as if instinctually.

I saw a rusty-looking bridge and thought of Pittsburgh so I picked interior Pennsylvania (somewhere).

I saw a rusty-looking bridge and thought of Pittsburgh so I picked interior Pennsylvania (somewhere, 209 km off).

That state has a powerful Senator though, so not all the roads are like that. There are some ridiculously overbuilt highways with no traffic.

I’ve never been to the US but somehow West Virginia was my first guess and I got it down to zero miles eventually. I don’t know why that state is so particularly recognizable

The bridge in the fitst photo is an old one lane bridge, probably was used by carriages. It looks like it mostly just connects a small neighborhood of houses, not a main road by any means. There are probably newer concrete bridges out of frame, but they're not as picturesque as old steel bridges.

There are plenty of old steel and wood bridges across the northeast that are exactly like that. They are closed to general traffic and only used by locals.

I was like "Huhm... a rural area?" and got very lucky: something like 1280 miles on the first guess and 0 miles on the second guess.

Got 23 miles on the first guess!

Spoiler: https://i.imgur.com/HK6sNsf.png

I did not even notice that it was giving me distance feedback after each guess.

I got 0 miles because the first photo was exactly the kind of landscape I grew up with. It also helps that almost all of the Texas photos are sure to have a flag or the shape of Texas somewhere.

0 mi in 4 guesses. The funny part was I forgot to look at the photos after the first two and had to go back and look at the photos to see what I missed. The first photo has a bridge, so that informed the clicks a bit since I knew I needed a stream, so some help from the content.

Right click image, open in new tab, read URL of image which is helpfully descriptive, search wikipedia for that bridge. Wikipedia article shows location of the bridge on a map.

In reality, I didn't cheat until the 2nd picture, because a picture of some guys shaking a politician's hand isn't really that helpful. If the image didn't tell you what union was talking to what politician, I wouldn't have been able to look up the street address of the union hall. Even then, I still couldn't find the town on the map, so I had to eyeball it to get 0 mi.

I got very lucky. My first guess was only off by 5.5 miles. If I knew the exact location ahead of time I probably couldn't have gotten that close if I tried, considering the zoom level of the map when I guessed it. That got me close enough to get right on for the second guess.

Unimpressed by this game. The accuracy on the scale is off by as much as 25%, as can be seen here: https://i.imgur.com/NOvqCnV.png. As the only information you're given other than a new photo is the distance, this is a serious problem.

What's worse, the 'correct' location radius doesn't even include the locations where all the photos were taken!

SPOILER FOR GAME #60:

Game #60 has a clue that shows YOU ARE HERE: https://i.imgur.com/98OXlal.png which is exactly here (google maps [1]) https://i.imgur.com/KdN4OCh.png which corresponds exactly to my guess location https://i.imgur.com/eCy97r6.png. However, they claim that the correct location is here: https://i.imgur.com/cSasI3g.png or https://i.imgur.com/ChuisIx.jpeg (google [2]), which is actually 9.5 miles away and outside their 5 mile radius, so it scored me as missing by 4.5 miles.

It's quite simply unacceptable to claim that all the photos are of the same place and then have the exact location within the photo not be within the accepted answer radius. Geoguesser, for example, REQUIRES you to identify the exact location within ~150 meters (in the worldwide mode) and they are actually correct with that degree of precision. This error of 9.5 miles is 15,000 meters away.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.3419792,-122.7415299,14.62z?...

2: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.2970892,-122.5563029,1891m/d...

Yeah they should not be using a Mercator projection if a key part of the game is triangulation AND there is a ruler shown on screen.

Yeah my first guess on #74 was 7.7 miles away (!) so I thought for sure I would get it. But it turns out that the flag location is actually 14 miles away according to Google Maps, and the multiple photos "of the same place" are over 6 miles apart. So I kept getting weird numbers for my guesses that didn't line up with the geography.

Man AND the ruler isnt the same size every time.

I kept getting wrong answer after wrong answer despite the fact that I was CONVINCED I was triangulating properly.....

But no! The size of the ruler kept changing!! I was using a constant 80px for it, and it was changing by as much as 30px as you zoomed in and out.

What a waste of time.

However I did get within 7mi once despite this terrible UX, because I saw a pic and was like "goddamn if that's not in non-Chicago Illinois" so I was within 200mi on my first guess and knew how to constrain my further guesses.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but that’s exactly how I would expect it to work and how it does work with Apple Maps and Google Maps. You can zoom at different increments than the scale label shows. Without changing the ruler size, how could this work? Am I misunderstanding you?

What I mean is like: I expected the different zooms to be specifically normalized so that at the most zoomed-out, 80px = 800mi, then 80px = 500mi, then 80px = 300mi, then 80px = 200mi, then 80px = 50mi, etc. But instead it was like.... 90px = 800mi, and 80px = 500mi, and 60px = 50mi, etc. So not only do you have to account for the changed scale, but you also have to measure the scale ruler at every increment.

Ah, you want more distinct zoom levels. On my mobile device, for example, the ruler for, for example, 1,000 miles can be different lengths depending on if I am slightly more or less zoomed in (via pinch). Which might be related to the choice of projection, because even just moving around the map changes the ruler length for me, for the same labeled distance.

Hmm for me I did have very distinct zoom levels here; I was only able to scroll in one tick or out one tick with my mouse wheel, it wasn't freeform. That's why I expected these quanta with a constant 80px-long ruler. Maybe on mobile it was a different experience.

It's an interesting site, but why do so many of these guessing games have single page applications without state in the URL?

https://guessthe.game/ functions the same way - please include the day in the URL so that if I want to go back through your backlog (or show someone something from your backlog) it's easy.

If I snoop the traffic and watch the redirects I sometimes can:

https://guessthe.game/?fpg=110

But this site makes it even more obnoxious:

https://pudding.cool/games/where/?uuid=i135v&rs=x0hdn&upc=9a...

Really? UUID? (side note: that's not a UUID)

What's adds to that annoyance is that the only way to navigate the games is a "prev" link. There's no way to jump directly to a game or go to the next game. This means every day it becomes more time consuming to get to the first game. And if you accidentally refresh the page, have fun!

I made a skateboarding video version and ensured it was URL driven via a date query param. You can also view all the previous games easily.

URL driven-ness is such a great ux feature I also get annoyed when sites don’t use it. https://skateboardle.com

noob question, but which frameworks would you recommend to use instead?

I'm using React because it's easy to re-use components. Which alternatives are there for that?

I would expect all frameworks to have support for URL parameters.

For React I've used react-router for this:

https://ui.dev/react-router-url-parameters

Theoretically, if you choose the first two points at random, then you have a 50-50 chance of guessing right on the third guess (the two circles from the first two guesses have at most two intersecting points) and should always get the correct answer on the 4th guess.

You can make up your own scoring system based upon the first two distances, with a high penalty (negative points) for needing the 4th guess.

Hundreds of hours of Geoguessr had me within 30 miles on the first guess despite having never been there. This is an interesting take on the concept.

I got one of them within 34 miles. Not my fault Appalachia has a look to it

Edit: wait, they're all the same place? I was confused on that point. I thought each was a different state.

yea i think i jumped passed the instructions and thought all the pictures were different places

got 64 (i think it's the rusty bridges...)

It's a daily puzzle. So everyone gets the same one today.

The original “where in the world?” location guessing game is GeoGuesser from 2013. There are competitions and some pro competitors can pinpoint locations within feet, though some rules allow the player to browse Google Maps in a separate window.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoGuessr

Rules? That sounds like a kind of Honor Rule since it seems impossible to enforce. I think it’s better to play with a time limit instead in order to make aids impractical. Of course in a duel or something you can just start the countdown after the first guess is made.

Is the idea that all pictures are the sane location? I got 17 miles, the pictures all had intense west virginia energy haha

I also did not read the very brief introduction. Then, some of the pictures looked similar and I got suspicious.

569, 1236, 512, 1734, 4.6 -- 4.6?? Pure luck.

If you can edit out the spoiler in your comment that might be polite.

Yeah, completely missed the instructions as well. There's plenty of room on the page, they should at least show by default on the first visit.

> They should at least show by default on the first visit

They did for me. Firefox browser on Windows 11. Instructions were showing when I first visited and I had to close them to continue.

First thing I one usually do on first visit of most pages is closing window to continue. So instead of reading the content I was searching for button to close it. Even though I knew it was not cookie pop-up!

My thoughts too, big WV energy (pun intended). I got 18 miles. It looks very similar to where I do a lot of camping.

Would have been too easy if there were any political signs lol. 14 miles for me.

I don't know why I was thinking Tennessee. Eventually I figured it out.

Got 0 mi on my first guess because I thought “That’s [state]” and then picked a random spot on the [other state] side of the state since it had that feel. I feel like I might as well quit at this point, lol.

Edited out spoilers.

Lol same, I was like "yeah this is Appalachia for sure, why not WV", clicked somewhere in the middle of the state, and got 14 miles :)

I thought "Kentucky" and was 200 away on first guess.

PA for me, it's like all the wrong guesses are just triangulating on the "most Appalachian" place lol

Same, though I clicked in the middle of the name “West Virginia” and was 34 miles away.

Spoiler alert? :P

Read the article before reading the comments? ;)

Went purely on feel and got 40mi on my first guess, and I felt pretty good about that! Took a couple silly guesses because I didn't see that the picture changes after each guess - the [geological formation] in the later photos should have been a dead giveaway.

The scale seems to be slightly off at very-close locations.

I had 4 guesses all within 1 mile of the location, but then the flag is many times further away from my guesses than the "1 mi" scale shows.

https://img.incoherency.co.uk/4472

I like this game very much. I don't know enough about the US to play it properly, but I enjoy playing it as partly a geometry problem, and partly a case of looking for Googlable clues in the photos.

There is a weakness because the images are loaded straight from Wikipedia: sometimes the filename of the image gives the location away, and even if it didn't I expect it's not too hard to get the metadata off Wikipedia given the image filename.

You might say "well don't look at the filename if you don't want it spoilt", but I often want to open the image in a new tab so that I can zoom, and then I accidentally see the filename.

Not the same location for me. 194 miles apart: First picture showed Stouts Mill Bridge https://goo.gl/maps/3JkHPWMQo3wK39ZD8 Last one Deer Creek Dam https://goo.gl/maps/u5zxGmby74X7JMWi7

The attribution on the first image shows that it's apparently the Burnsville Bridge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnsville_Bridge

It seems that these two bridges just happen to have almost the exact same construction and type of trees around. However, you can see that in the first image from the parent article that there are four houses in the background, and if we look up the bridge attributed to the first image in the parent, it has those same four houses in the background: https://goo.gl/maps/WLnbN845pa4Hw1Yi7 Compare to the wikipedia photo used in the parent article: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Burnsville_Bridge.jp...

The Stouts Mill Bridge does not have those same four houses in the background, it has a different set of buildings in a different arrangement near it: https://goo.gl/maps/3JkHPWMQo3wK39ZD8

This is really cool, great project. I thought the instructions were clear, especially as it obviously follows in the trend of Wordle style games.

Don’t understand the people complaining about the game when it’s their own lack of reading comprehension failing them.

I went back a couple days to #74, and laughed out loud at the second photo.

Not sure if this link will work, but it should take you to #74: https://pudding.cool/games/where/?uuid=6aa7v&rs=q0hdp&upc=tu...

Nice of them to put a picture of the state with a star right on the tank.

I don't get it. What's funny about the water tower? That it has the town name? Even with that, I couldn't find the name on the map reliably. Or is it a different picture?

It has an outline of Illinois, with a star right where the village is located.

So I brought up the map, zoomed in on Illinois, and put my guess about where that star was.

Ah heh, I missed that. Funny indeed :)

I don't get it. What's funny about the water tower? That it has the town name? Even with that, I couldn't find the name on the map reliably. Or am I looking at the wrong picture?

The photo was too small so first thing I did was open it in a new tab only to have the game spoiled by the URL as the image had been hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons.

I really wish it was easier to zoom in on the photos to find clues. Also the maps being used for the game were rough for me. Lacking details, town names, clear rivers unless you're way zoomed in, etc. Google maps would be a much better choice imo.

I came here to say this. I enjoyed the game but I spent more time zooming in/out of the tiny map window rather than solving the puzzle

It's pretty easy on mobile but the photos are often bad quality. They were probably taken in late 00s/early 10s, submitted to Wikimedia and never really updated with modern cameras.

I enjoyed it as is. Rather than looking for specific details, I was looking for general feel and atmosphere with things like vegetation, architecture and building materials, and even colors. The photos provided were usually good enough for that. If you’re going for GeoGuessr accuracy, these are going to disappoint. But I don’t think this site is going quite that far.

This is pretty neat! Although I find myself relying far more on triangulation via the distances than I do the images.

Same. The image helps with a first and maybe last guess, and sometimes there's something highly identifying in the image, but triangulation would be enough if I could only accurately estimate distances. The scale on the map helps.

It would be cool if the radii were drawn at the end? It would be too easy if they were drawn before, I think.

Alright. I went all the way back to the first one. It was pretty easy to triangulate some of them. Some of them have clues to location in the photos. It was fun.

I would like to point out some issues with the scale displayed. There are quite a few cases where the scale only changes when you shift the map so your guess could be affected by an incorrect scale. The first location was one example. After I guessed the location from the first photo (it's pretty obvious if you have been out there) I made a second guess that cut the error by about half. My third guess was inside the radius which appeared to be about 5 miles even though the actual location plotted as correct was well outside any point that could've been triangulated from the first two guesses. I suspect the scale was not correct since moving the map by grabbing it updated the scale.

I managed to get quite a few of the 75 or so available by the third guess. I got a couple on the second guess since I recognized the geology of the area. All in all when you miss by 0.02 miles I think it is close enough. This makes me think the error radius changes based on the individual photo since I had narrowed the location to within 0.04 miles on one California location and wasted two picks narrowing the location while still remaining outside the "correct" radius.

Pretty fun stuff. Thank you sir. May I have another?

Got within 75 miles on the first try, even though I have only been to the US once in my life (and nowhere near there). Of course that’s partially just a lucky guess. But it made me ponder the giant influence of American TV and movies on my life. Playing the same game with China for example, I would have been completely and utterly lost.

don't think it's just a lucky guess, same for me. Only been to the us once, looked at it for five seconds and just thought 'somewhere near Pittsburgh' and got within 50 miles. The North-East of the US in general seems very recognizable. I sometimes play Geoguessr when I'm bored and it's always places in the South of the US that seem much harder to guess.

FWIW, today's puzzle seems particularly straightforward. I've since tried a few of the earlier ones, and sometimes was on the wrong side of the country altogether for the first try.

I like the map picking a lot better than naming the country in WhereTaken[1]. The US version is even easier because you only need to guess the state.

[1] https://wheretaken.teuteuf.fr/

The cool thing with wheretaken and worldle is that I've learned a lot about countries and their borders. If I could pick on a map, I wonder if I'd retained how things look in certain parts of the world, but not what country they are in.

Another awesome game for anyone who is into geography and, in this case econ: https://oec.world/en/tradle/

I've been playing this (https://wheretakenusa.teuteuf.fr/) for a while now, it's nice albeit a bit hard at times. There's also a worldwide version.

Great geo-guessing, very intuitive, and today's chosen pictures have just the right amount of help. If I'd paid more attention to my intuition I wouldn't have tried Montana as a guess! When I did ... 171 miles.

"I'll be back!"

My first guess was 25 miles away (!), but could only get to 11 miles in the final one.

You almost had me, covert dataset labeling company. Where's the input box to tell you what Transformer I would be based on my name and zip code?

Most /s but also maybe not.

I played Wordle like a lot of people did early on, and bailed around the time NYT bought it. Since I've found a couple of games in the same theme that I've enjoyed - once guessing the movie from single frames, and one (featured here!) where you're playing a Scrabble word against "Dad" which is a fun gimmick.

I like this one too. It requires a little bit of context-clue-sluething, some logical deduction, and best guesses.

Oh god, after reading the comments I'm so upset that they were all from the same place. I got 1.7 miles away on the FIRST GUESS! and I fucked it up....

This is fun. My first guess was 34 miles from the place. It took four tries to get to 0. Though, I don't understand the indoor one.

i think it's auto-generating a problem based on geotagged pictures. the indoor one isn't supposed to be a good clue, it's just a photo that happened to be in the dataset.

Could maybe pass the pictures through an object detector. Too many faces and it skips the picture. It may already be doing it to remove pictures with words as one "clue" containing a sign would spoil it. Though I'd rather it keep the picture but blur the sign in that case.

#60 has a picture of a map, so I don't think it's being filtered.

There are definitely pictures with signs, I've been going back through the archives.

they could, but i kinda like the wildness of it. not knowing if you're going to get a completely useless clue (or one that totally gives away the answer) is part of the charm,.

Tough clue, but I guess folks in that area (or into politics) might recognize the longtime US Representative from WV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McKinley),

I didn't recognize him but figured something about that bunch of overweight white men said Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, or WV to me.

That’s fun. Although a picture indoors seems unfair. Somehow I knew one of the pictures had to be West Virginia and got within 40 miles. But the indoor one I got the exact opposite of the country because how are you supposed to tell? Literally all convention centers in the US have the same walls and awful garish carpeting.

Indoor photos can still provide good clues. I had no idea where the first picture was. I guessed somewhere in Vermont. But that second picture had me guess West Virginia because David McKinley was in the photo.

Ah thanks for the info! Yes that would likely substantially narrow it down, I didn’t recognize him but there was at least a clue.

165 miles. Started off 200 miles away but became obsessed with PA. and never really got closer

I am guessing Trevor Rainbolt would dominate this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Rainbolt

If anyone knows the creator of this site, they might want to fix the bug of being able to get a different `frame` of reference on all of the images.

Wiki commons may be a great place to find images, but they do too good of a job naming things.

I started at 100miles, diverted to 140 miles, then quickly narrowed into 40mi accuracy by guess 5. In under 30 seconds.

Certain parts of America just have a "look".

A rusty, sad, religious, whitebread, Under Armour Tucked Into My Jeans look.

Seems like a great picture for Bruce Springsteen's next album cover.

No kidding, I’m from Australia and my first guess was 155 miles from the location. My closest ended up being 140. I basically thought, “that looks like the mid west… Alabama” and had a stab!

Edit: sorry I meant Nashville

Some of the photos were actually taken about a thousand feet from the zone where you were marked "correct". I clicked right on top of the dam for my fifth guess and it showed me being 0.2 miles off.

I've never been to the location/state but I got 56Mi on first try, best guess 23Mi. I can't tell you what about any of the pics made me think it was that state. It just felt like it.

Even without knowing any real hints from the pictures myself, it was still a lot of fun for me refining each guessed location based solely on distances reported on previous guesses. Nice work.

Is it cheating to use Google Maps? I got to zero miles on the second guess because it was a picture of a sign, and I just looked up the church to which it referred.

Funnily I arrived only 18 miles from target, a place I never heard of and have absolutely no idea how it looks like :)

Not sure if I should be happy or upset with my result. https://ibb.co/x5DSh04

This is a late comment.

I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. On my phone, almost nothing responds to taps. It's like the interface is broken.

I couldn't figure it out at first. I thought I would get to see all 5 photos and then make my guess.

You have to make a guess after each photo. This will display the next one. You have to tap the large button at the bottom "show map to guess".

For today's one, I've only been to [state] once, 20 years ago, but once I saw that bridge in the first picture I knew it was in [state].

I’m curious: Have you spent a lot of time on the east coast in smaller towns off the coast?

I live nearly 400 miles and a couple of states away and that looks just like one down my road. And there are tons like that between here and there.

I've never been to the states in the photos and somehow got within a few hundred miles of them. Guess my brain has had enough training data.

You’ve been trained by the internet

So, I did not realize these were all supposed to be the same location.

I find it funny that my best guess was what appeared to me to be a Ohio conference room.

I managed to get within 5.4 miles, thinking that they were all different places. I didn't realize until I read the comments here.

Spoiler alert: Viewing source of the photos told exactly where the image was from. (all West Virginia). So I got 35 miles, then 0 miles.

I got within 10 miles, pretty proud of myself. Could have probably done better with google maps showing lakes / reservors

I got:

17 Mi -> 10 Mi -> 11 Mi -> 0.3 Mi -> 0 Mi!!!

17 miles. I don't even live in the US.

That's extremely impressive. I've spent a ton of time within >100 of that first bridge and was still off by a ton. Did you use external resources? If not, how did you know with such precision (honestly central PA is as good a guess as the true answer!)?! Or was it a good guess?

Well the fucking thing doesn't work on my mobile phone. I clicked every button and nothing happens.

Well, today I learned that I'm very good at identifying that something is in West Virginia.

You can almost triangulate from the distances without even using the pictures.

My first guess hit 17 miles from the mark.

Maybe that's because I've been there...

open the image in a new tab and there are often some serious clues in the filename- is this cheating?

I actually did it initially to be able to zoom in and see if I could read the guy's badge on his shirt

I absolutely love this! Got to 107 miles on the first try :)

Perfect game to play with your phone on the shitter.

The hacker in me couldn't help but view the image source, easily found the location. I know it's cheating but I wanted to get it right within 5 guesses lol

Fun game! Thanks to the provider.

> Wait, it's all Ohio?

> Always has been

This. A vast number are in rural Ohio

I got 63 miles on my first guess

My best guess was 9 miles away!

Keep being US-centric.

So everyone got the same pictures? Seems kind of non-random in terms of where the locations were, too. Nothing from the west coast in 5 photos?

Don't know if everyone got the same pictures, but I believe it's like a wordle type game where you get 5 guesses to get the correct location, all the images are for the same location, and every day they release a new 5 image puzzle. You click and it tells you how far away from the location each click is which honestly allowed me to get within 30 miles by the end of every set cause I could just triangulate approximately where it wanted me to click.

all 5 photos in roughly the same location I believe to help you narrow it in. Every day a new location with 5 new photos you can drill down with.

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