How well do you know McMaster’s campus? Could you identify a location from a single photo? Could you pinpoint within a few metres of where it was taken?
That’s the concept behind MacGuessr, a game inspired by GeoGuessr. Players look at five photos from campus and try to guess where each one – exactly where each one – was taken. There’s a daily challenge, and a game that people can play at their leisure.
Like many great innovations, MacGuessr was born out of boredom.
Third-year Software Engineering and Management student Kylie Gun was at home and looking for a new challenge. GeoGuessr had become her go-to study break last semester: Making a McMaster version, she decided, might be a fun summer project in her spare time.
To start, Gun put a lot of time into planning the game, coding it, and working out the bumps, based on feedback from her friends. Before launching it, she spent two hours walking around campus, taking photos with a friend.
It led her to discover corners of campus she’d never seen – like the artwork lining the first-floor halls of the DeGroote School of Business, and the Alpine climbing tower tucked behind Ron Joyce Stadium.
“McMaster has so many different buildings… it’s not just a uniform campus,” Gun said. “That’s given a lot of variety to the game.”
The game launched in September, right as the term started – strategically timed for when students returned after the summer. Gun shared the project on LinkedIn, where the Faculty of Engineering reshared it. But it really took off when someone shared it on Reddit.
Since then, Gun said, the game has been played over 3,000 times.
She thinks part of the game’s popularity comes from just how much can be explored at Mac: “A business kid may never have entered H.G. [Thode Library], and an English kid may have never entered the DeGroote building. It’s having those people interact with the game and see parts of campus that they’ve never seen before.”
In addition to her photos in the game, users can submit photos they’ve taken around campus, which she approves before they get incorporated into the challenges. She has plans to add more capabilities to the game someday, like a login feature where people can keep track of their streaks.
Gun had no idea it would get as much traction as it did — and it’s had an impact on her own goals, too.
Gun is a part of the McMaster Design League, MAC Formula Electric, and McMaster Rocketry Team, and she volunteers with Trees for Hamilton — where she helps redesign their website and, also plants trees. All these experiences have been valuable, helping her to form connections, gain mentorship from upper-year students, and build technical skills.
But creating MacGuessr, overseeing every aspect from start to finish, and seeing people use it has been really exciting.
“I wanted to expand my own technical skills, but I still wanted it to be a project other people can interact with and enjoy,” Gun said.
It’s got her thinking about creating more public-facing work, or something that caters to people’s day-to-day lives. “I never thought that many people would play,” she said. “It’s rewarding to see people using it…. it’s still crazy to me, but it’s been really fun.”
When she’s walking around campus, often in the library, she’ll spot her game on people’s screens.
Asked if she ever goes up to someone playing the game and introduces herself as its creator, she smiles and shakes her head.
“My friends always want to. But I just like to admire from afar.”