The Map Room

Globetrotter XL is an online geography game with a twist: you’re given the name of a city and challenged to put it on the map, but your score is determined by how close to the target you can get, in kilometres — it isn’t enough, in other words, to get the right country — with bonus points for speed. Even trickier: the city names are given in the original language (e.g., Venezia instead of Venice) and, after a certain level, national borders disappear. Via desjardins.

The Redistricting Game is a surprisingly addictive Flash-based, online game that illustrates the state of electoral redistricting in the United States. It is, in a nutshell, gerrymandering as computer game: your missions include stacking the deck on behalf of your party, protecting all incumbents, and creating a minority district — and getting them past the legislature. The last mission delivers the site’s message: what redistricting would look like if the maps were drawn without considering the electoral impact and were not subject to the influence of politicians keen on re-election. An interesting (but by no means disinterested) teaching tool. Via All Points Blog.

Previously: Computer-Generated Electoral Districts; Congressional District Maps; U.S. Electoral District Ballot Initiatives; State Redistricting Pages; Texas Congressional Redistricting.

Finally, a geography quiz that isn’t a variant of pointing to a country on an interactive map. This quiz, though, isn’t interactive; it’s simply the online version of a feature that appeared in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, so it’s just a list of questions followed by a list of answers. But the answers are refreshingly tough — I’d have to think about some, and probably would get more than a few wrong. Via Gadling.

I’ve posted those interactive geography games and quizzes before, and I’ve posted Google Maps-based sites before, but I think that Find the Landmark is the first map game that is powered by Google Maps (rather than Flash). Here’s how Geoff Menegay, who developed it, described it to me:

A game that tests your knowledge of famous landmarks, and a few obscure ones. Also tests your ability to zoom and pan a Google Map to find the landmark in record time. Once you get tired of playing, you can spread the joy by submitting your own landmark for other people to try.

In practice, this is fiendishly difficult — almost too difficult. The user-submitted landmarks are sometimes so precise that you can’t find them unless you know the area by heart. It’s like Scavengeroogle or GoogleEarthing, but on a timer.

Marc de Kam writes to plug his map quiz site, called, oddly enough, The Mapquiz: “The mapquiz shows you a series of mapfragments, and each time the question is: where is this? Some fragments are placed in a different perspective, others ripped out of their context. Just for fun.” In English and Dutch; the site has some formatting problems in Safari and Firefox.

Another damn geography quiz (see previous entry): this one, from the German version of RTL, requires you to throw a dart on the capital cities of various European countries; you’re scored based on how off the mark you are. In…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another geography quiz — this one requires you to drag and drop each state onto a map of the U.S. Harder than it looks: if you’re off by even a bit, it’ll mark it as wrong. Via Travel Writers. (See…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another Flash-based geography quiz (see previous entry) has been posted to MetaFilter: this one tests your knowledge of the 48 contiguous states of the continental U.S….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another geography quiz — the Geography Olympics — has been posted at MetaFilter. While I generally stand by the comments I made in this entry back in April 2003, this one at least has a good, Flash-based user interface. Still,…  •  Continue reading this entry.