小游戏挑战你我地理IQ

One of the most popular videogames on the Internet right now is about as low-tech as a high-school social studies quiz.

The free game, Traveler IQ Challenge, has become an unlikely hit by getting players to locate Kinshasa, Moscow and other cities and attractions by clicking on a crude, two-dimensional world map, and scoring them based on the speed and accuracy of their responses. Created as a marketing gimmick in June by TravelPod, a travel Web site owned by Expedia, Traveler IQ now has more than four million people a month who play it on sites across the Internet, including Facebook's popular social network.

Traveler IQ is part of a wave of what's known in the industry as 'casual' games -- low budget, easy-to-play titles like card games and puzzles -- that lack the visual flare of slick new products for the Xbox 360 and other game consoles. Traveler IQ is also tapping into a renewed interest in geography, stimulated by new technologies like GPS satellite-based navigation devices and Google Earth, a program from Google that lets users browse a three-dimensional model of the planet.

'I'm addicted,' says John Riccitiello, chief executive of videogame publisher Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif. Mr. Riccitiello says his overall Traveler IQ ranking got as high as 11th in the world at one time, but his standing dropped as more people began playing the game, sinking to 204,184th. 'Once something gets really popular, you realize what a dolt you are,' says Mr. Riccitiello, who travels about 175,000 miles a year.

Traveler IQ Challenge was inspired by games played by Luc Levesque, a Canadian programmer and traveler who founded TravelPod. When he was on train trips across Turkey and driving for days to reach remote salt flats in Bolivia, Mr. Levesque, 32 years old, would randomly name a country and one of his travel companions would attempt to name another country or capital city that starts with the third letter of the previous country's name.

The idea for an online geography game occurred to Mr. Levesque in May when Facebook of Palo Alto, Calif., opened its site so independent software developers could create games, music and other simple applications that its huge audience could post on their personal Web pages. Two programmers created the game for TravelPod in just under three weeks for an amount Mr. Levesque won't disclose, but which is likely less than $30,000 at standard salaries for engineers.

The game was designed to funnel users to TravelPod.com, an ad-supported Web site that lets travelers set up blogs chronicling their trips. 'We've seen huge increases in registrations and traffic,' says Mr. Levesque, who adds that the Ottawa, Ontario, company could eventually put ads directly inside the game. More than 1.6 million people have installed the game on their Web pages on Facebook. Most of the players of the game now come through other sites that have the program on their pages, including the CBS show 'The Amazing Race.'

Traveler IQ starts out asking users to locate some of the better known cities and attractions in the world, like London, giving users a limit of about 10 seconds to pinpoint them on a map. The locations quickly get harder with cities like Ashkabat, Turkmenistan. The game tells users how close, in kilometers, they got to the actual locations and scores them accordingly, with more points awarded for shorter distances.

Andrew Bridges, an attorney at a San Francisco law firm who has traveled extensively around the world, the game is one of a number of new technologies that help stimulate his interest in distant locales. For fun, he says he'll see how fast he can manually zoom in to find a monument like the Acropolis in Athens using Google Earth.

Jerome Dobson, a geographer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who doesn't play the game, says new technological applications like Traveler IQ are helping to revive geography after a decades-long decline in the teaching the subject in U.S. schools. Issues like climate change, globalization and the war in Iraq are also encouraging interest in far flung places. Mr. Dobson, also the president of the American Geographical Society, an association of geographers and geography enthusiasts, says writer Ambrose Bierce said around the time of World War I that ''War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.' '

Still, studies suggest there's a ways to go before the public improves its grasp of geography. A survey from early last year sponsored by the National Geographic Society found that only half of young American adults, ages 18 to 24, could locate New York state on a map. Six out of 10 couldn't find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.

Travel IQ provides its own report card, of sorts, on geographical skills. Among those who use the game on Facebook, Tata Consultancy Services, a technology consulting firm based in India, had the lowest average Traveler IQ among workplaces, at least until the rankings were updated during the middle of this week. Mike McCabe, a spokesman for Tata Consultancy Services in the U.S., in an email called the findings 'interesting' and said the company will consider them when training its staff, though he said, 'Engineering skills and an overall cultural understanding of the company and its customers' are higher priorities at Tata than geography.

如 今在互联网上最火的一款游戏，其技术含量却与高中生的社会学科测试相差无几。

这是一款名为《旅行者IQ大挑战》(Traveler IQ Challenge)的免费游戏。游玩家在一张二维地图上寻找金沙萨、莫斯科或其他城市及景点的所在位置，然后根据答题的速度和准确度来评分。怎么看这都不像是款会大受欢迎的游戏。但Expedia Inc.旗下的旅游网站TravelPod出于营销目的在6月份推出这款小游戏以来，其每个月的在线玩家人数已经突破400万，其中甚至包括 Facebook之类流行社交网站的用户。

《旅行者IQ大挑战》在业内被称作“休闲”游戏，像卡片游戏和谜题游戏也属于这种类型，其特点是开发成本低，易于上手，画面也不像为Xbox 360等游戏机开发的新游戏那般绚烂华丽。而另一方面，随着全球卫星定位系统(GPS)导航设备及Google Earth等新技术的应用，人们对地理知识又开始感兴趣起来，于是便有了《旅行者IQ大挑战》的成功。Google Earth是谷歌公司(Google Inc.)推出的一款电脑软件，用户可以在地球的三维模型上进行地理搜索。

美国游戏发行商电子艺界 (Electronic Arts Inc.)的首席执行长约翰•里奇泰洛(John Riccitiello)称，我已经沉溺于这款游戏难以自拔。他表示，自己的全球排名一度到过第11位，而随着越来越多的人开始玩这款游戏，他的排名已经掉至第204,184位。这位每年行程达17.5万公里的高管称，一旦某样东西真正流行起来，你才知道自己有多么弱智。

这款游戏的创意来自TravelPod网站创始人、加拿大程序员卢克•莱维克(Luc Levesque)玩的一种游戏。当32岁的莱维克坐火车横越土耳其，或驱车去玻利维亚偏远的盐沼旅游时，会时不时与同伴玩一种单词接龙游戏，规则是用头一个国家或城市地名的第三个字母作为下一个地名的开头字母。

今年5月份Facebook开放其网站，允许数量庞大的用户在个人网页上公布独立软件开发者制作的游戏、音乐和其他简单的应用软件。于是莱维克便有了制作一款在线地理知识游戏的想法。他聘请了两名软件开发人员用三周时间制作了这款游戏。虽然他没有透露成本几何，但一般情况下的报酬应该不到3万美元。

莱维克制作这款游戏的初衷是想引导用户登录他的网站TravelPod.com。这个网站是靠广告收入维持运营，旅游爱好者可以在网站建立博客来记录自己的旅行。莱维克称，网站的注册人数和点击量大幅增长。他表示，最终有可能通过游戏直接投放广告。目前已有超过160万人在Facebook的网页上安装了这款游戏，不过大部分玩家都是从其他网站上下载的，就连哥伦比亚广播公司(CBS Corp.)的“惊险大挑战”(The Amazing Race)节目网页也提供这款游戏的下载。

《旅行者IQ大挑战》按照由易到难的顺序，一开始会让玩家用10秒钟左右在地图上找出伦敦之类的比较知名的城市或景点，很快接下来的提问会越来越难，例如找出土库曼斯坦的首都阿什哈巴德 (Ashkabat)。然后游戏会告诉玩家自己的答案离城市的实际地点偏离了多少，并给予相应的评分，偏差越小则得分越高。

经常周游世界各地的旧金山律师安德鲁•布里奇斯(Andrew Bridges)表示，这款游戏和其他的几种新技术手段调动起了他对千里之外地点的好奇。他表示，想看看自己在Google Earth上能用多快的时间找到雅典卫城之类的某处名胜，这是件好玩的事情。

堪萨斯城大学(University of Kansas)地理学者杰罗姆•多布森(Jerome Dobson)虽然没玩这款游戏。但他认为，数十年来地理课在美国学校教育中的份量不断下滑，而包括这款游戏在内的新科技手段有助于推动地理学科的复兴。像气候变暖、全球化和伊拉克战争之类的事件，也在唤起人们对遥远地区的兴趣。身为美国地理学会(American Geographical Society)主席的多布森引用美国知名作家安布鲁斯•毕尔斯(Ambrose•Bierce)在第一次世界大战的话称，战争就是上帝让美国用来学会地理的。美国地理学会是一个由地理学者和地理爱好者组成的团体。

但研究表明，让美国普通大众提高地理知识还很有长的路要走。美国国家地理学会(National Geographic Society)去年初组织的一项调查显示，美国18岁至24岁的青年成人只有一半能在地图上找出纽约所在，60%的人在中东地图上找不到伊拉克。

《旅行者IQ大挑战》还会定期公布关于地理知识的各类成绩排行榜。至少本周更新之前，在Facebook上玩此游戏的人中，平均地理IQ最低的单位是印度高科技行业咨询公司──塔塔咨询服务公司(Tata Consultancy Services)。该公司驻美国发言人迈克•麦克白(Mike McCabe)在一封电邮中称，这项统计很“有趣”。他表示，公司会在培训员工时考虑这点。但他称，相对于地理知识，公司更重视工程技能，以及对公司及客户文化的总体理解。