If someone says, “Where is Moscow? Please point it out on the map,” you might be surprised to find you don’t actually know. The game “Globetrotter” is quite difficult.

In this game, a city name and country name are displayed at the top of the screen, and all you have to do is click on the point on the map where you think it is within the time limit.

The level and total score are displayed on the top left, and the number of questions, the current question number, your score, and the target score to reach the next level are displayed on the right.
When you click, the distance between the clicked location and the correct city is displayed; the shorter the distance, the higher your score.

This is surprisingly difficult. If it’s a city I’ve never heard of, I feel like it’s understandable to get it wrong, but when it comes to cities in large countries, I often don’t know where they are. Moscow is one example, and even Toronto in Canada, where I have been several times, I surprisingly didn’t know. Do you know where Washington D.C. or Beijing are? It’s quite difficult.

Once the national borders disappear, I have absolutely no idea.

It is interesting to have something with this kind of game element. The structure of the game is really simple, but it’s educational as it presents the names of many different cities. And it’s in English… Do you know Lesotho? You probably don’t. I didn’t.

Well, it was fun.
The backend is made with Flash. I imagine it holds city and coordinate data in a text format, XML, or something similar, and calculates the distance based on the coordinates clicked on the world map. I suspect there is some simple adjustment being made for the margin of error.

Globetrotter
http://games.dschini.org/play/7/globetrotter/