Lerwick stumps quizzers in daily UK map game
PlayPinDrop owner questions if Shetland being placed in map boxes has led to confusion
JUST one in five people were able to identify that Lerwick was in Shetland on a daily UK map game.
Players of PlayPinDrop were asked to drop a pin on Lerwick on the UK map, with just 141 of the 693 pins landing in Shetland.
Forty eight players dropped their pins outside of the UK, with the crowd’s average consensus pin landing almost 300 miles away from Lerwick – in Perth and Kinross.
PlayPinDrop creator William Watkins said he was surprised at how few people knew where Lerwick – which now ranks in the top three UK places that players were unable to identify – was.
Sumburgh Head is also in the top three hardest locations, calculated from places where at least 150 players guessed, with only Orford Ness in Suffolk harder to find.
Watkins said he had expected some players to miss Lerwick on the map, but did not expect the high volume of wrong answers.
“With Lerwick being a pretty distinct location to the north I thought more people would be familiar with it,” he told Shetland News.
“Looking at the map there is a pretty high concentration of people who thought or guessed it might be in Northern Ireland, northern England or very commonly Orkney.”
He questioned if Shetland’s placing in a box on national maps – or exclusion from maps entirely – had resulted in people’s lack of knowledge about where Lerwick is.
The Islands (Scotland) bill was changed in 2018 to prevent public bodies from putting Shetland in a box on official documents.
Public bodies can place Shetland in a box, however, if they provide legitimate reasons as to why it has been used.
Former Shetland MSP Tavish Scott said that Shetlanders find it “intensely annoying” to see the isles moved or placed in a box.
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“I’m guessing that for most people Shetland has always lived in an inset in the corner of the map, not where it really is,” Watkins said.
“Lerwick is about 300 miles from Edinburgh and only about 220 from Bergen in Norway, and people don’t carry that picture in their heads.
“How far north it is might not be fully set in people’s minds.”
PlayPinDrop was launched in February of this year as a daily world map game, with the UK version following on 26 August.
Players can take on a UK-centred challenge to find towns, cities and landmarks across the country, with other specialist games including a global challenge and one where players are asked to identify locations from footballing history.
Watkins said he had built the game “because I’ve always loved maps”.
“I was having a conversation with my father-in-law who loves daily games and I wanted to bring the two together,” he said.
“What started off as a little fun side project grew into a game that now has over 7,000 daily plays. It has been such a fun journey and I’m continuously working to make the game better and more fun for all of its players.
“After many suggestions from my players to build a UK-specific version, I shipped the UK game at the end of August.
“It has become one of my more popular games, with around 300 to 450 plays a day.”
Though most players did not know where Lerwick was, Watkins said that Shetland had fared much better.
When the game asked for Shetland itself, almost half of players landed within a mile of the isles.
Watkins said he was now open to more suggestions for locations in Shetland which could be used to stump players.
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