User:Alt4ies/An Aquatic World

= An Aquatic World = An Aquatic World (also known as Aquatic World and abbreviated as AAW or AQW) is a user-created map that can be played on the browser-based geography game GeoGuessr, in which players are tasked to guess locations from Google Street View imagery. The map features locations from all over the globe. The common theme of all the locations on An Aquatic World are that they contain images or depictions of aquatic animals.

The map has been described as an educational tool for both geography and marine biology; players can learn and identify global geographical and cultural characteristics, but also learn about the wide range of aquatic animals that can be found around the world, and at which places these different creatures can be found.

Locations
The map currently contains 3,882 locations submitted by over a hundred contributors who volunteered their time to search Google Street View for topical locations. All the map's locations include sea creatures, or some fictitious creatures such as mermaids. Some locations show real sea creatures: crabs, market fish, and sea life found in aquariums are a common theme on the map. Other prevalent themes include murals and artwork of marine life, and restaurants that sell fish and advertise the ocean life in the storefront. The map boasts aquatic diversity, with well over 1000 fish locations alongside over 400 crustaceans and over 300 aquatic mammals such as seals, whales, dolphins, and even polar bears available on the map. All locations use Google Street View technology that has been obtained and published by Google Maps.

Country Distribution
A majority of the contributors are based in the United States, meaning the map country distribution are largely unbalanced. Around 32% of the locations in An Aquatic World are found in the USA, with the next highest country represented being the United Kingdom, with just under 10% being found in Britain. Germany, Japan, and Mexico are the next most represented countries in the map with 4.1%, 3.7%, and 3.5% of the locations being found in the respective nations. Every country that displays official Google Street View in its country has a minimum of 1 location, including nations with limited coverage such as Tanzania and Belarus. Countries with no street view (e.g. Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Brunei) do not have any locations on An Aquatic World. Every state in the US and all but 1 Russian Oblasts have at least 1 location on the map.

Availability
GeoGuessr has a paid (subscription) memberships. There are three tiers of membership ranging from. All GeoGuessr Pro subscriptions enable the user to invite people to play without having to pay. Paid memberships include unlimited ad-free play, tournaments, ranked and unranked competitions, friend challenges and invitations, as well as the creation of customized maps (just like An Aquatic World). This way, the map can be played in custom parties, singleplayer, or in challenges with the paid subscription. However, users with a free account are able to play against others in challenges and custom parties if hosted by a paid user.

Development
The map began its development by Montanan Twitch streamer and YouTuber CallMeTheOceanMan on 5 September 2022. The inaugural livestream on this date began a large community effort to obtain aquatic Google Street View panoramas.

He continues to carry out regular broadcasts on Twitch in which himself and viewers will add locations to the map. These broadcasts are typically held once or twice per month, or when a new country obtains Google Street View coverage. This means efforts can be focused on adding many aquatic locations from any new coverage. The chat facility is used to submit Google Street View locations. CallMeTheOceanMan's Discord server also has a channel dedicated to allowing users to submit Google Maps links of oceanic street view locations when he is not broadcasting. Efforts are sometimes focused on countries with newly-imported street view, or with countries and regions with limited locations in the map.

The map's development is used through two separate websites. Map Making App is a website created by ReAnna that provides helpful tools that enable users to create maps on GeoGuessr. CallMeTheOceanMan uses this website to add locations to his map, but to also help collect data on the map. How many locations are found and submitted by individual contributors, how many locations are of different sea creatures, and the country distribution of the locations in the map are all examples of data that can be gathered using this website. Locations are exported from the site and are imported into the official GeoGuessr map maker that allows the map to be published and played by anyone with a GeoGuessr account.

Other Contributors
The most dedicated contributors have submitted hundreds of locations since the map's development began in September 2022. User dharman246 is the leading contributor of the map, providing over 700 locations to the map. man_of_bananas has provided over 350 aquatic locations to An Aquatic World, whereas nearly 200 locations have been provided by ChumleyChum. While the leading contributor has provided locations in a wide and balanced variety of countries, man_of_bananas and ChumleyChum found the majority of their locations in the United States and United Kingdom respectively. CallMeTheOceanMan himself has found and uploaded over 1,100 aquatic panoramas, around 30% of the total locations.

Reception
The launch of the map in September 2022 was deemed as successful. Upon its release, CallMeTheOceanMan created a video that gained around 50 views. This video and the livestream where the map was launched came alongside a GeoGuessr challenge (a multiplayer gamemode allowing multiple players to compete). The launch stream and the challenge both attracted many people within the GeoGuessr community to come and play the map, which also promoted more aquatic locations to be submitted. The map now has nearly 400 plays, with 30 likes. The map was also displayed as the "featured map" in the Weekly Geo blog that showcases popular news within the GeoGuessr community on April 12th. Version 3 of the map was posted on August 8th 2023, after some technical difficulties experienced by CallMeTheOceanMan.