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Comment by carlob | Hacker News Reader

What's the etiquette: is it fair to Google what you find on signs?

I don't play for the points. I play to be dropped in the middle of a place and explore a place I would have never seen. But I do google since it is fun to be right.

Once I was dropped on a logging road in Canada. It took about a hour to hit a paved road and another 15 minutes to find a sign announcing the logging road ahead. I found a sign and googled it. Even that was wrong. I thought I was in Oregon but was wrong.

I had the opposite experience: once I was dropped in Macau. Where else do you have signs in Portuguese and Chinese and a large baroque church in ruins? I had sub-kilometer precision without even moving.

Cologne cathedral was also rather easy to identify. But all those rural roads prove to be hard.

My personal rule is that I can spin in place, but I can't move and certainly can't google anything.

That said, it's a game where you pretty much make up your own rules.

Can't google shit, sure, but sure you can move. Just as if you were dropped somewhere on Earth and had to figure out. First tip to get is "do they drive left or right handed" :)

Question is, were you dropped somewhere with or without a smartphone? :-)

My personal rule is absolutely no googling. I've been tempted to print out a list of all the phone area codes and take it with me in my virtual alien-ship-to-random-destinations since that is something I could actually do were I preparing for such a scenario.

I thought that was cheating, just like looking on the map for terrain that matches, until I saw someone on HN post "Challenge mode: 20 minutes and no zooming on the map". I was already doing that lol...

Sometimes I play with the "no-Google" rule, sometimes not. I am obsessed with this game. It's useful to study the Street View coverage map [1].

My best non-Google ever was being plopped down in front of a motel in Idaho City I'd stayed at; the second best was in front of the Miaoli train station in Taiwan. Both times, within 5m of the original location.

[1] https://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

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