All The World’s A Score
Google maps exists in spaces beyond its service: as a photographic medium, a data visualization tool, and as a means of casual exploration. Bordering these lies one liminal reality where digital colonialism leaves no home left unseen. One must opt out to remove their home - or may not even have the option to opt out - revealing that no surveillance is benign. Faces and homes can be blurred, but not always accurately - and, moreover, bodies are never blurred.
Geoguessr, which gamifies Google Maps, places players in a random part of the mapped world and invites them to guess the location. While it can foster deeper empathy for distant places, homes, and people, what does adding a score mean, and how does it further the concept of digital colonialism? Because these mapped spaces glitch and break, they’re, inherently, images that can never truly represent the homes and bodies of the people who live there. Should they? And what does it mean to play a game of misrepresented, non-consenting spaces?
