Game Analysis: Guess Where NYC
In January 2005, a user known as killthebird on the online photo sharing service Flickr created a public group called Guess Where NYC. At 459 members and 2,857 photos, the group is relatively popular and has been replicated to varying degrees of success in 51 other cities; from Missoula to Tel Aviv to Shanghai. Participating members post photos from around their urban surroundings to solicit others to add comments, guessing where the photos were taken. Each city has a distinct set of rules and overall character. Depending on the city, there are rules about the allowed frequency of posting and the proper way to add metadata tags identifying guessed and unguessed photos.
Despite having started four months later, the San Francisco version has surpassed New York in terms of the number of members. Despite the larger number of members, San Francisco only has half the number of photos as New York, which may be evidence of widespread “lurkers.” London is a distant third followed closely by Los Angeles. For active groups, the posting and guessing appears to fit to a kind of powerlaw distribution. A few members post and guess very actively while there are many who only participate infrequently. While it’s hard to make generalizations for a game whose character is changing constantly, it seems that members are more willing to participate as posters than guessers.
As a social software service, Flickr isn’t primarily designed to be a game environment. Before creating Flickr, its creators, Ludicorp (now owned by Yahoo!), beta-tested a web-based massively multiplayer game called Game Never Ending. Known commonly as GNE, the game was abandoned during development, but one can find evidence of its heritage in the occasional Flickr URL ending with the “.gne” file extension. In GNE, players traded virtual items in a fictitious environment that rewarded players for their ability to explore and share information with others. There are several other games based on Flickr and Guess Where NYC is not the oldest of them. However, to a much larger extent, the “Guess Where” games seem to treat photos as locally-rooted artifacts similar to those that defined the game play of GNE.
While Flickr’s features are sufficient to playing “Guess Where” informally, to keep rigorous score of players’ activities would require more functionality. Further, there is no way to make use of the “interestingness” feature of Flickr in the context of a group. By tagging photos appropriately you can successfully find the “most interesting” photos that haven’t yet been located, or those that have been found. Each city has created its own tagging dialect, which would complicate any effort to unite the various cities into a larger context. However, these drawbacks don’t seem to stifle participation. Indeed, I would say the less structured, the better, for this type of game.
The corporate website for Ludicorp cites “real time interaction” as its stock in trade. Most interactions between Flickr users are distinctly time-shifted, but “Guess Where” is one of the few examples I’ve seen where using the service quasi-real-time makes sense. Depending on the time of day a photo is posted to the group, and its relative difficulty to guess, a photo might remain unguessed for minutes or months. Skillful guessers are those that comment consistently and those who can finally identify locations after long periods of time have passed. The group forum provides an ad-hoc mechanism for players to interact and create additional nuance, such as the “hall of fame” (the most frequently re-posted locations) and the “dungeon” (long-unguessed photos).
The game is ongoing and has no clear winners or losers, although at any given time you might gain some insight as to who the most successful players are. The top 4 posters to the group (by number of posts) are clearly identified by Flickr’s built-in features, however top guessers are harder to identify. One metadata convention among players is to add a tag identifying who guessed a given photo (for instance “whatiseeguessed” from the user whatisee). The tag clustering feature of Flickr does yield a couple possible leaders using this measure, but since most users haven’t adhered to it, it cannot be considered accurate. Even without clear cut winners, members do participate with evident earnestness.
The motivation for playing seems to stem from a desire to demonstrate the knowledge of one’s surroundings. Guess Where NYC allows players to test their individual New York experience against the eclectic challenges put forth by each additional post. Judging from the discussion within the group message board, posts are valued most for their obscurity and difficulty of being guessed. Of course those photos that never get guessed due to over-specificity are not very useful to the game. For a city as diverse and labyrinthine as New York, it’s not surprising that many residents are eager to use this game as an aggregate measure of their explorations. It allows players to corroborate that their knowledge of the city is larger than simple trips to and from the office.
Of course these same features are likely true of many of the other urban cities that have created “Guess Where” games. The noteworthy thing about Guess Where NYC, compared to other games on Flickr, is its capacity to adapt to each city. The premise is simple enough to create numerous variations each suited to a specific set of players. “Guess Where” is a kind of meta-game, one that encourages its players to explore their physical surroundings and interact with their urban neighbors. Photographers are rewarded for ambiguity and subtlety and are required to take more consideration for their audience. While “Guess Where” may not share much in common with more conventional games—those with scores and finite time frames—the elements of play and fun are very much present.