The Sad, Sad Face of an Academic Game Addict: Traveler IQ Challenge, reviewed

I don't play computer games. Why? They are addictive. Correction: I would be an addict. So I made a promise to myself in college (when I saw my buddies slipping in classes due to computer games) that I would stick to paper-and-pencil gaming.

But a map quiz isn't a game, right? Right?!

The TripAdvisor "Traveler IQ Challenge" on Facebook is totally addictive. For me. Which is sad. But since it is obvious I'm never going to be great at this game (although I AM in the top 400 for the quiz of my own regional specialty, thank you very much!) I will take the academic way out.

I will critique it.

Stop laughing.

The game is based on a standard projection world map. Names of places are flashed at the top of the screen, and you are timed on how fast and how close you can click to the location. Points are awarded and you get a score. You have to score a minimum on each level to continue to the next.

There are some obvious critiques for this game, no doubt made elsewhere. The map is too small, which means that Belize is barely visible and Easter Island doesn't appear at all. Locations have to be given a single point, which means large features like Lake Titicaca are marked for scoring purposes with a single point. There's no credit for knowing that Easter Island is in the Pacific far west of Chile, or knowing merely that a city is somewhere in China -- scoring is all based on distance and time.

My deeper critique has to do with the use of the standard projection map. Sure, it's the one we all grew up with. It's the one we consulted to learn where Timbuktu actually was and such. But it is an inherently skewed vision of the world, where the equator is 2/3 of the way down the page, Greenland is disproportionately huge, and the southern hemisphere is unnaturally condensed.

When I worked in Central America I was introduced to the Peter's Projection Map, which corrects these problems. It has been criticized -- what hasn't? -- but it sure does make the world look very different. My colleague told me he liked it better because his nation looked bigger. It does, but so does everything in the south. As it should. Africa is huge.

What does this mean for my addictive map quiz? Because you are judged on how "far" you click from the actual location -- in terms of miles in real space -- mistakes made in the southern hemisphere (where there are more miles per pixel) are punished disproportionately. This does mean that to do well in this game you need to know where Swaziland and Montevideo actually are; you can't guess as well as you can with locations in Macedonia, which barely covers more than a couple of pixels anyway.

Nevertheless, one's attempts look more accurate in the southern hemisphere because the distance on the screen is far less. Perhaps there is a hidden irony here -- we North Atlantic types usually think we mostly understand the rest of the world until it comes back to bite us in the ass.

Now if you'll excuse me... I have a top score to beat.