Where am I?

The practical organisation of finding one’s location in a geography computer game

Abstract

The paper provides a descriptive analysis of the practical organisation of playing Geoguessr, a geography computer game in which the player has to find their location on Google Maps using only Google Street View. It is argued that in order to do this, the player assembles an occasioned corpus of geographical knowledge. It is shown that by constantly foregrounding and backgrounding details of the unfolding scenes in search for clues to “where I am”, the player anchors common-sense geographical categories in the sequences of enacted actions. Finally, it is proposed that the activity of playing Geoguessr, while not constituting the discovery practice per se, shares some commonalities with other discovery practices, such as scientific discovery or detective work.