Appropriation: Geolistenr

By Ruby Harkness

Geolistenr:

Geolistenr is based on the well known game Geoguessr. Geolistenr acts the same as Geoguessr in the sense that the player is trying to figure out where in the world they are. Instead of google earth images, Geolistenr uses 10 second audio clips from around the world. The player will hear 5 different audio clips and attempt to match each clip to a country in a word bank. 

How to play: 

The Idea: Geoguessr with audio clips

• Geolistener can be played with as many people as you want
• One person acts as the game master, and uses the spreadsheet to access audio clips 
• The game master will choose 5 audio clips coming from 5 different countries
• They will write sound 1, sound 2, sound 3, sound 4, sound 5 next to a list of the 5 country names that go along with the sounds  (the game master should shuffle the countries around so they do not line up with the sounds) (see playtest image below) 
• The game master will then play each sound for 10 seconds, and the player(s) will try to match the sound up with the country 
• When played with more than two people, players are allowed to collaborate and talk about where they think each sound is from 
• The player(s) win if they get all of the countries correct 
• The spreadsheet is pictured below and shows how the game master keeps track of the sounds and countries 

Artists Note: 

Appropriation is using something someone else made to create something new. Geoguessr is a game in which the player is dropped into a random location on Google Earth and asked to decipher where they are based purely on their surroundings. I think this game is heavily based on appropriation, and uses maps, or Google Earth, to create a very enjoyable game. I thought it might be interesting to take a game based on appropriation and appropriate it further. (I also just enjoy playing Geoguessr.) 

I wanted to take appropriation of maps in a different direction and utilize sound as the main recognizer. It is based on DADA performance work. Before taking a deeper look into it, I was under the impression that DADA was overall a visual art movement. I have since learned about the intersection of visual and audio performance that was utilized in DADA after learning about Sophie Tauber and Hugo Ball’s collaborative performance project. While Ball performed a sound poem, Tauber danced. I thought this was interesting, and wanted to explore sound as a DADA theme. The original idea was for the game master to say outloud the name of a city and have the rest of the players guess what country it was in, but during a critique someone suggested using real audio from different places, and so I went digging for a source of audio clips. Finding the sounds was one of the most difficult parts of creating the game, but I ended up appropriating an artistic project titled “Cities and Memory.” This site is a project based on providing different sounds in different places all over the world. I went through and hand picked 25 sounds I thought would provide enough information that the player(s) may be able to tell where they are, but I didn’t want to make it obvious. In a perfect world, I would find a way to automate this process, but for now 25 sounds leaves enough room for 5 play-throughs of the game. 

I did three play tests of the game, one with a game master and one player, one with a game master and 2 players, and one with a game master and around ten players. The first play test done in class with one player was super fun, and it was interesting to see what the player thought of the sounds and how they interpreted what they were hearing. With two players, discussion was a big aspect of the game, and the collaboration between the players as they tried to figure it out was interesting to see. The final playthrough, done with the entire class was even more interesting, and made the game a lot more time consuming, with people going back and forth between answers throughout the entire playthrough. After much discussion, they eventually ended up getting all the sounds correct. It was interesting to see what assumptions the players made about places based on audio, and how language could either help or hurt them. Most of the audio clips I played utilized language, and watching the players try to decipher which language was being spoken and where it is commonly spoken was very intriguing. It was mentioned in a play through that this game could also provide a commentary on colonialism, and how that has altered the way language has evolved in different places. This is an idea I think the game could really utilize, and it could definitely be explored further with different game modes and groups of countries. If this game does anything, I think it provides players a bit more knowledge of the world through having to solve a puzzle. I am very interested in the world, and spent a lot of time lurking on “Cities and Memory,”  It is linked below if you would like to check it out. I love Geoguessr and in the future want to expand Geolistenr even more by adding more countries and sounds to the reference sheet.

Spreadsheet Link

Cities and Memory Link

Playtest and Spreadsheet Images: