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PlaceSpotting

a video game

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ7200210
Source-derived summary

PlaceSpotting was an online game, based on Google Maps, developed by Swiss programmer Martin Fussen. Its server is based in Switzerland and has English- and German-language versions. In international Media, PlaceSpotting is recommended as a "challenging amusement" and an "educational way of wasting time on the internet".

Overview

The way PlaceSpotting works is simple:

To create a new quiz, move and zoom the map until it shows an interesting place. Provide some hints for the person who will try to solve it and a message one will see if the riddle is solved. After saving the quiz you can send it by mail to a friend or embed it in your homepage as a picture.

If someone wants to solve the quiz their task is to find the place shown in your picture on a second google map. The site additionally has a blog to share questions or hints, a search function, and the possibility to rate quizzes.

Players are scoring an approximate 11% success rate.

In the first 30 months after going live approximately 3.3 Million quizzes were opened and 20,000 created.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “PlaceSpotting” is a video game. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through PlaceSpotting, video and game, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 183-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, PlaceSpotting, video and game is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “a video game” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7200210. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “PlaceSpotting”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow PlaceSpotting primary sources, PlaceSpotting archive and PlaceSpotting research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “PlaceSpotting”?
  2. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from PlaceSpotting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.