Anthropeum: A Geoguessr-style Game for Human Artifacts

Anthropeum is a daily guessing game centered on human artifacts

Anthropeum is an interactive educational game that challenges players to identify the geographical origin and time period of human artifacts. Using a dataset of 500,000 artifacts, the game presents ten objects per day, requiring players to place a pin on a map and select a time bracket to guess where and when the object was created.

Core Gameplay and Scoring

The game functions as a "Geoguessr for artifacts," where points are awarded based on the proximity of the player's guess to the actual location and date of the artifact's origin. After completing ten rounds, players receive a final score and their position on a distribution curve relative to all other players who played that day.

Data Sources and Technical Integration

Anthropeum leverages several open-source and institutional data sources to power its experience:

• The Met, Open Access: Provides the primary collection of artifacts.
• OpenHistoricalMap: Used for geographical and historical mapping data.
• historical-basemaps: Integrated for historical context.

User Feedback and Community Insights

Players and community members on Hacker News have highlighted several strengths and potential areas for improvement regarding the game's mechanics and usability.

Educational Value and Pattern Recognition

Users report that the game trains the brain to recognize patterns in art and history. One player noted that the experience helps identify gaps in their own knowledge, stating:

I've been to a lot of museums and I didn't realize how much information I wasn't retaining. No quiz once you exit I guess. Anthropeum really starts to train your brain to remember patterns, times, and locations.

Usability and Interface Challenges

Several users identified technical issues with the user interface, particularly on specific screen sizes:

• Timeline Readability: The timeline labels can overlap on narrow desktop windows (tiled side-by-side), making them difficult to read.
• Slider Precision: Some users found the text on the time slider to be too close together.

Gameplay Balance and Suggestions

Community members suggested several refinements to the game's pacing and scoring:

• Round Count: Some players felt that ten objects per day is too high a time commitment for a daily diversion, suggesting five objects instead.
• Time Resolution: A suggestion was made to adjust the time resolution so that the recent era (1750-2000) has the same number of divisions as the ancient era (1000-3000 BC).
• Learning Feedback: Users expressed a desire for post-answer explanations to provide more educational context about the objects.
• Collection Bias: Some users noted that the Met's collection may have inherent biases in its acquisitions, suggesting the inclusion of other museum collections to provide a more balanced global perspective.