Background:

My brother-in-law, Ben, has discovered a new online hobby. Ben has always been good at sharing online hobbies with my family and his enthusiasm is easily contagious. When I was in high school, he introduced us to Geocaching, which involved an online community of treasure hunting/hiding where often repurposed tools for hiding keys such as fake rocks or magnetic tins were hidden in public places with notes, tiny treasures, or adventures for their seekers to find. During pandemic times, Ben stumbled upon a completely online game, which he advertised as akin to virtual Geocaching…kind of. Ben discovered Geoguessr while working in the kitchen and watching YouTube videos. At various points over the past years, Ben and I have lived together for months at a time and this kitchen work YouTubing practice is something I have most definitely become familiar with, often it was Linus from Linus Tech Tips, who kept Ben company in the kitchen. A Geoguessr livestreaming video was an automatic play that he probably would have skipped over if his hands hadn’t been messy from his work in the kitchen. Ben did not know anyone outside of the livestreamers whose videos introduced him to Geoguessr who played, although he has already shared his enthusiasm with multiple coworkers in his lab at University of British Columbia, his mother-in-law (a.k.a. my mom) and now, me since for this interview exercise, I asked if Ben would be willing to show or teach me how to play this game, Geoguessr.

I offered to set up a Zoom call for us at 2pm CST, 12pm PST on Wednesday, July 1st. I am currently at my parent’s house in Champaign, IL with my mother, my sister and niece, Ben’s wife and daughter, while Ben is at his apartment in Vancouver, BC with his dog, Ginny. My sister’s family has been separated since mid-March since my sister was in the US with my niece for work when the US-Canadian border closed in response to the novel coronavirus. While I have been very grateful for the time that this pandemic has unexpectedly given me with my sister and niece, I have very much felt the absence of my brother-in-law. Knowing his affinity with technology – he is our family’s go to person for tech questions and I am sitting in front of the gaming computer her built for my mom as I write this – I felt it fitting to ask Ben to help me trial virtual interviewing, something I have never done before as an interviewer.

As tends to happen with me in interviews, I started taking notes and quickly got wrapped up in the interaction and playing the game, so there are some notes from the beginning, some from the end and then a handful of screenshots from in between. Then main notes came from my post interview write up.

Day 1 (7/1/2020 @ 2pm CST):

Ben had me log in and create an account – the online server was down, so we ended up chatting about his trip to the dog beach with Ginny. It’s Canada day today, so in anticipation of busy beaches, Ben, his friend and their dogs went to the dog beech earlier in the morning. Ben had just given Ginny a bath and briefly tilted the camera he had set up on his desk to show me Ginny’s head resting on his lap as they shared corn chips from a bag off screen. Although he’s family, Ben and I do not have a history of video chatting, so this was a good test run of sorts. Despite the server being down, we practiced sharing screens and he checked to make sure he could notate/draw on the screen I was sharing a kind of virtual pointing that he thought would be important for our teacher/student, co-play dynamic.

Day 2 (7/2/2020 @ 2pm CST):

Today we got down to business a bit more quickly. After the trouble with the Geoguessr server the day before, I had logged on to make sure I could set up the account before we started. Ben had also texted me to let me know when the Geoguessr livestreamers noted that the server was back up and running. As a skilled teacher, Ben had me share my screen, so I could learn by doing.

As I have a free Geoguessr account, I have access to one game a day with five rounds per game. One round of Geoguesser is being placed on a virtual map, somewere in the world and having to guess where you are – the closer you are to the actual location, the more points you earn. There does appear to be the ability to play in parallel through the app, or challenge a friend or stranger to guess closest and fastest, but for today, we did not mess with the bells and whistles, we just explored and puzzled things out together. Ben talked me through orienting to particular features on the street view using the compass to imagine particular formations on the map (literally sketching things out that we were seeing on the screen). This was particularly important when street names were not as visible. There was some delay between when his notes would show up on the screen, so I had to learn to pause, so that I didn’t move the screen before he had made his markings. The different rounds all had their challenges, some allowed much more movement than others. See figures 1-4 to see the Geoguessr platform and how we occupied the space (at least on my computer.)

We played all five rounds and spent almost 2 hours together. When I noted surprise at how quickly time had gone by at the end, he shared a link for a spot where he was dropped in the middle of the outback and had had to “drive” 3 hours down the road to find a road sign, partially blurred out, to find the nearby cities… in other words, 2 hours for 5 rounds was nothing!! (Click here to see Ben’s outback hard earned Geoguess!)

Reflection on the interview:

In the virtual space with the shared screen, I found myself much more mutually engaged in the game, than in the interview as other to the interaction. Most specifically, I was not intently watching Ben’s face, but very much settled into a shared virtual space where our backround noises blended (e.g., Ginny standing and stretching, construction outside his apartment, my niece’s running feet, my neighbor’s lawnmower, email and message notifications). I do think for future virtual interviews, I would like to ask the participant to take a screenshot of their screen, share or reflect with me how they structured their interface for the interaction since I know that these set ups can be quite different. I think I was surprised by how much the “doing the interview” fell out of mind as the “learning the game” and “guessing the spot” and “listening to Ben’s strategies” became the thing of import. As I had noted prior to starting this practicum, the “double-entry” notation practice was outside of my interview practices – I believe this exercise became more like participant observation than interview and I did not practice this method well. As with anything, I believe I would have to practice more to see the utility of the double-entry method… As always, this is a snapshot of a work in progress….

 

 

Figure 1: Screenshot from Game 1, Round 1 on Geoguessr.

Figure 2: Screenshot from Game 1 – Ben using the draw on screen feature to highlight the “flag” button which takes us back to position we are challenged to guess

Figure 3: Screenshot from Game 1 – post-guess, our guess vs actual location – Ben highlighting that despite the image, we were not actually in that building, we were on the waterway

Figure 4: Screenshot from Game 5 – there was no ability to move, we could only rotate and change the view from this one point on top of the Basilica di San Pietro