GeoGuessr is the greatest feat achieved in games for reasons entirely external to the game itself. I think that's something realised by all its players on a (sub)subconscious level, but is rarely mentioned in discourse about the game, or even its constituent parts. It exists only because of an incomprehensible amount of photographic data being readily available for almost anyone on Earth to use. And this access is borderline mundane to us, alongside so much borne of the Internet age.

That I can get live information on traffic and see the outside of a restaurant across town in seconds is already dumbfounding on its own. However, I could do that for anyplace, anywhere on the globe. We have this asset which lets us see anywhere on the entire planet in crystal clarity, and instead of exploring the sheer boundlessness of our world, we use it for our local sphere the vast, vast majority of the time. I can see a dirt road in the middle of the Australian outback with the same amount of effort I consistently put towards checking for street parking near my doctor's office.

Where GeoGuessr excels is in showing you an elsewhere without requiring input. The sheer near-infinity of possibilities in global exploration vis-à-vis Google Street View can instill a decision paralysis, even when actually committing to a choice. The local sphere pulls even here not as a magnet to your present place, but to one starkly similar or dissimilar. And in seeking, however inadvertently, a (perhaps misguided and miscalculated) maximal boon of knowledge and culture and worldliness, there is that gravitation to the noteworthy. Similarly, there is a repulsion from the non-place, defined by Marc Augé as an anthropological space of transience and anonymity. This dissection of the world into places and non-places is perhaps semantically valueless, but it is a truth as, in being dropped into a non-place, there is a feeling of disappointment because one's perceived worldliness does not expand. The non-place thus remains necessarily transient and anonymising as this information of the non-place remains bounded to the non-place; there will not be talk around of the globe of a random Albanian fence post, or the interior of a suburban shopping centre in a town of 50,000. This is, in part, due to perceived worldliness being denoted by visitation to places of supposed import. In contradistinction and in theory, one's worldly knowledge should be the sum of familiarity with non-places distant from actualised places, as non-places are most void of knowledge. Through memetics and mimesis, places of import can already be, in essence, visited without physical travel, but a non-place cannot. Yet with GeoGuessr, they can be.

As mentioned above, GeoGuessr shows its players an elsewhere determined at random from an enormity of data (unless one plays a fixed map). I am equally as likely to land in Jardin des Tuileries or Ngorongoro Crater as I am to be placed on a barren strip of highway in Uruguay. In the case of the latter, perceived worldliness approaches uselessness compared to an understanding of non-places. This is due, in large part, to the identifying features of a space meant for anonymity. In the absence of signifiers we might know through cultural osmosis, the mundane becomes an invaluable asset. This is multiplied exponentially by how transient the non-place is. A highway, as a non-place, is identified with ease should it be near a roadsign indicating distance and relation to real places. Increasing obfuscation of the relation to actual places renders the non-place more anonymous and unknowable. Consider an approximated heirarchy of identifiers in GeoGuessr: place label, landmark, flag, TLD, language, country telephone code, architecture, license plate, street sign, flora, cars, utility pole, bollard, resolution, relation to sun, road composition. Some of these are considered of greater value than others in determining (and establishing) a place due to their applicability to a specific place (or non-place).

By being thrown into a non-place, that hyper-specific knowledge of no real value (for the vast, vast majority of the population) becomes essential in achieving a high score. And even without it, locating a place or non-place, however approximated, remains fun as one learns deliberately of subconsciously those signifiers. Consider and compare the play of an amateur entertainer, a speedrunner, and the high-scoring player. They play the game with vastly different knowledge and technique, and indeed for very different purposes. But they're all having fun and honing their skill while doing so. They are all analysing the properties of the non-place to render it into a place.

What I am long-windedly trying to convey is that GeoGuessr, as an extension of Street View, demonstrates the (un)knowability of the world in a way allowed only by our attempts to make it known. In a cynical sense, corporations try to make the world knowable for its exploitation. Optimistically, in quantifying what is or can be known, we are made aware of how much we do not know, and how much there is left to know. In its random presentation and in asking the player to locate themselves, GeoGuessr implores us to consider the non-places of the world as places unto themselves.

Minus one star for increasing feature bloat and the effective need to subscribe. If the reduction of value for something so miraculous by something so petty doesn't show you how underappreciated our contemporary miracles are, nothing will.