I think I am a casual gamer, in that during my adult life I have not felt the urge to play any computerized/video games as a sustained hobby. I've played them: Leonard and I have spent many an enjoyable evening with Super Mario Galaxy or Puzzle Fighter, I've enjoyed the odd hour of Tetris while listening to a podcast, I used Dance Dance Revolution and/or Wii Fit as an exercise routine for a few months, and I used Python Challenge to improve my Python skills during my first Recurse Center batch. But I haven't installed or played games on my laptop or phone.

So this morning, as my thumb aches, I give props to GeoGuessr.

GeoGuessr gives you a panorama from somewhere in the world -- sometimes you can move around, if the photo is from Google Street View -- and asks you to guess where you are on the world map. It's cool to play with someone who's been to different countries than you and speaks different languages than you do, so you can complement each other's skills. Even a cartographer from National Geographic sometimes can't guess well based on empty dirt roads; I am now curious to learn a bit more botany so I can go beyond "this biome is ... desert?"

Maybe you played it when it started in 2013. The developers have now added some cool new "maps". For instance, you can play among only New York City locations (Leonard and I made that more fun by adding the "turning and zooming is OK, moving is not" constraint). (GeoGuessr says you'll get to try the five different boroughs, but so far we've only gotten Manhattan locations.)

Perhaps the coolest map is the Famous Places map (example game), which we've now played several times. Talk about cheap travel. Sitting on our couch, we can visit so many beautiful monuments! I immediately recognized the Hermitage, and Leonard got the UK Houses of Parliament right away, and gosh, it was pretty to look at historic bits of Turkey and Greece and Italy. I love that GeoGuessr shows us countries we hadn't particularly thought of visiting, and shows us how cool it might be to go there. It's like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? crossed with a friend's travelogue slideshow.

During normal play, sometimes GeoGuessr drops me into a residential suburb somewhere in the US, and then I feel like I am driving slowly through streets full of suspicious white people who are about to call the cops on the brown interloper in their midst. I am not casing your houses, driveway-havers! I am looking for any textual evidence at all for what state you live in! Could some of you start hanging state flags under the US flags on your flagpoles? That would help.