Quite a good idea. And good fun. Some suggestions for improvement:
1: The photos are very US centric. So difficult for the rest of us to have any context to work from [eg: Jeopardy quiz show, long distance US city street scenes, basketball matches, cheerleaders, etc]
2: Similar to above. Some of the photos are of things like long range city street scenes or beach scenes where there's nothing much to go on as regards recognising the 'accoutrements' of a particular era. The photos which work best are ones where there are decent views of people's clothing, vehicles, machinery, etc. You need to give us something specific to the era in question, to go on!
3: I think the 'High Score' functionality is broken. It's still showing my first go as my high score. Even though I've bettered that every time since. It might also be good to eventually have a leaderboard, so we could place ourselves amongst other high scorers. [EDIT: High score has started working now. Must have been a glitch].
BTW - for anyone else playing, you can use 2-finger trackpad scrolling to zoom in and out on the photos [a la Google Maps]. I only discovered this by accident and it made things a lot better as, in some of the photos, the people and 'devices' are very tiny.
I got quite a few non-US ones: a number used Cyrillic writing, some Spanish or maybe Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French, German, some other languages I didn't immediately recognize, and a number were clearly not from the US based on other clues from the people or environment.
I don't think this game needs to be "fair"; the most fun were the ones where I was wildly off!
>a number used Cyrillic writing, some Spanish or maybe Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, French, German, some other languages I didn't immediately recognize..
It's not the languages used in signs that I had a problem with. And I wasn't complaining about the fact that there were a lot of US ones per se. It was more that, several of the US ones you only had the "cultural reference" [for want of a better phrase] to go on, as there was nothing era-defining in the image.
For example, I got a photo of some basketball players. No period costume, no recognition factor of anyone involved, or the team colours or kit. As far as I knew it could have been from any time in the past 60 years. Similarly a picture of some cheerleaders --same problem. I also got a picture of a department store I'd never heard of. Just the building. No people or vehicles or anything. Presumably it would have meant something to someone from the US, who might have recognised it or had an idea of when the brand was established. But it meant nothing to me.
Conversely, I got several photos [as you did] with signage in foreign languages. But, in those cases, there was enough other "stuff" I could pick up on --things like the syle of clothing or the facial hair, or the cars-- to allow me to make a reasonable guess.
So, I'm not objecting to images being predominately fomr the US. I presume it's an American site. But, as I said previously, we need something to go on, otherwise it's just a random guessing game.
I tend to use clues like color saturation, grain, and depth of field as much as cultural references. Assuming they didn't add artificial artifacts, that can give you a pretty reasonable range to start with.
In the end, everyone knows more about some things than other. I know next to nothing about cars, or sports. "Something to go on" is different for everyone.
Even very obvious things are not always "very obvious" for everyone. I had one with Heinrich Himmler inspecting what seem to be POWs. So, probably taken between 1940-1944. Easy. Would you expect someone from Indonesia to get this? Or south America? Or Africa?
Fantastic game and extremely usable UI even on mobile. My biggest groupchat (which admittedly has a lot of photographers) has been playing all morning. 4196 is the score to beat!
8 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 26.5 ms ] thread1: The photos are very US centric. So difficult for the rest of us to have any context to work from [eg: Jeopardy quiz show, long distance US city street scenes, basketball matches, cheerleaders, etc]
2: Similar to above. Some of the photos are of things like long range city street scenes or beach scenes where there's nothing much to go on as regards recognising the 'accoutrements' of a particular era. The photos which work best are ones where there are decent views of people's clothing, vehicles, machinery, etc. You need to give us something specific to the era in question, to go on!
3: I think the 'High Score' functionality is broken. It's still showing my first go as my high score. Even though I've bettered that every time since. It might also be good to eventually have a leaderboard, so we could place ourselves amongst other high scorers. [EDIT: High score has started working now. Must have been a glitch].
BTW - for anyone else playing, you can use 2-finger trackpad scrolling to zoom in and out on the photos [a la Google Maps]. I only discovered this by accident and it made things a lot better as, in some of the photos, the people and 'devices' are very tiny.
I don't think this game needs to be "fair"; the most fun were the ones where I was wildly off!
For example, I got a photo of some basketball players. No period costume, no recognition factor of anyone involved, or the team colours or kit. As far as I knew it could have been from any time in the past 60 years. Similarly a picture of some cheerleaders --same problem. I also got a picture of a department store I'd never heard of. Just the building. No people or vehicles or anything. Presumably it would have meant something to someone from the US, who might have recognised it or had an idea of when the brand was established. But it meant nothing to me.
Conversely, I got several photos [as you did] with signage in foreign languages. But, in those cases, there was enough other "stuff" I could pick up on --things like the syle of clothing or the facial hair, or the cars-- to allow me to make a reasonable guess.
So, I'm not objecting to images being predominately fomr the US. I presume it's an American site. But, as I said previously, we need something to go on, otherwise it's just a random guessing game.
Even very obvious things are not always "very obvious" for everyone. I had one with Heinrich Himmler inspecting what seem to be POWs. So, probably taken between 1940-1944. Easy. Would you expect someone from Indonesia to get this? Or south America? Or Africa?
> otherwise it's just a random guessing game.
It kind of is, partially.