fifa complements geoguessr

posted sep 2024

I really like GeoGuessr, a browser-based geography game in which players are tasked to guess locations from Google Street View imagery. I think it’s a great way to learn about the world, and at one point in my life I played enough to the point I’d have considered myself as “pretty good” (for a few months I held a ranked ELO in the 1200s, which is the highest division / top 0.002% of all registered accounts).

I also really like FIFA, a football simulation game (it’s since been renamed to “EA Sports FC”).

Anecdotally, talking about my enjoyment of each game invokes diametrically opposing reactions:

• Enjoying and doing well in GeoGuessr seems to carry a sense of intellectual curiosity and wordliness (nerdiness aside).
• On the other hand, people react to FIFA as if there’s nothing more philistine and uncultivated than enjoying making your 11 virtual dudes chase a ball better than 11 other virtual dudes.

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However, here are 5 ways that knowledge accumulated from playing FIFA directly helped with learning GeoGuessr (and about the world!):

• I recognised the “L with stroke” (ł) character from former Borussia Dortmund winger Jakub Błaszczykowski’s name – this character almost exclusively exists in Poland and is always an insta-lock for me.

bro had 90 pace or something

• I learned that Athletic Club Bilbao only signs Basque-origin players, and I noticed that some of their names have “x” in them (e.g. Xabi Etxeita Gorritxategi, Jon Aurtenetxe, and to a smaller extent Real Sociedad players too like Imanol Agirretxe) – this later became a huge tell for me to region-guess the Basque Country in Spain and France.

Muniain was one of my favourite footballers for a while

• Tons of Finnish footballer names have consecutive-letter geminates (2 of the same letter back-to-back representing a new sound) (e.g. Teemu Pukki, Sami Hyypiä, Jussi Jääskeläinen) – this applies to tons of Finnish city names and words in general.

Teemu Pukki, FPL legend

• At one point Zakaria Bakkali was the highest-potential young player in FIFA Career Mode. I was curious about his name (since it didn’t sound like a typical Belgian name), and after some rabbit-holing I learned about Berber languages and the Tifinagh writing system, which actually showed up on a street sign in a Morocco photosphere in a game.

Tifinagh script on a street sign!

• Portuguese contains “ã” and Spanish doesn’t, and also the occurrence of “ão” (e.g. Rafa Leão, João Moutinho, João Mário). Also, I recognised the “-ção” suffix (which is an insta-lock) because I knew the Brazil National Team’s nickname was the “Seleção”.

My most recent Career Mode save (which I binged on the evenings of my internship this summer) was AC Milan

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this is a really small snippet, and:

• there are many other subtle bits of knowledge about the world I picked up from FIFA that I can’t really express in obvious 1-sentence “rules” like the ones above
• truthfully I’m washed at GeoGuessr and probably forgot some interesting things too