How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Great idea for a vibe coded project that is actually creative/original. Got in the top 4% as a professional historian. Would be interesting to see the professions of the people in the top .1 percent - is it people with Geoguessr type abilities or more like art historians and curators at the Met, I wonder?
I've been playing this nearly every day and sharing the results in my family's group chat. 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. I often get stumped by whether something is Peruvian, African, or Native Islander. Always more to learn!
This just became my new favorite daily game. The only thing I’d change is the time resolution: 1750-2000 should probably have the same number of divisions as 1000-3000 BC.
I wonder how many people are using external resources when playing this. I have a hard time believing that the average lumps so far to the right of the score distribution unless this game is played exclusively by anthropologists haha.
I studied History of Art in school - long ago admittedly, but it was clearly helpful in identifying differences between eastern and western portraiture. It was, however, far less useful at helping me identify artifacts from Central Africa and Mesoamerica.
I used no external resources since that would defeat the purpose of this.
Given that, I placed in the 64th percentile based on a couple of really accurate matches (renaissance sculpture, fnar) and a lot that weren't terribly wrong.
Central African and Mesoamerican stuff trips up almost everyone with a Western art history background, the visual vocabulary just isn't taught the same way. I've spent time with Benin bronzes specifically and even then dating them within a century is rough.
I scored above the median just getting the continent and millennium right. Admittedly I used knowledge about population density to pick the most likely spot, but that hardly makes me an anthropologist. I assume regular players will also pick up on patterns in where most artifacts are sourced from.
Small nitpick: "lumps" should probably be "clumps" I think? Anyway agree, most of these scores reek of Wikipedia tab switching mid-guess, not actual knowledge.
I collect artifacts/coins as a hobby, and I often come across things that are undocumented/unattributed. Saw the Met had an open access program and wanted to recreate that feeling with more artifacts:)
It's pretty nondescript but that specific piece was from a pretty famous Avar horde uncovered in Albania. There's a sizeable collection at the Met with things that look similar. Keep an eye out for the rivets and rectangular gold sheets like that, they're belthook designs for nomadic riders!
The scoring is the same as a project from a year or two ago that used AI generated videos, I wonder if this a rework of that? I think this is a definite improvement, if so.
I think the "top nn%" is misleading if you do terribly, though. "Top 67%" sounds better than average, but a look at the graph shows that my inability to distinguish between locations of tribal art puts me well below average.
It reveals a link to a page with more information, after you guess, and embeds an excerpt from that page, although they're a bit vague and general. Usually with a bit of scrolling I can find the part where it says what the thing actually is.
This is great. I suck, considering how much I like anthropology and history ... Would be nice to have access to other museum collections, considering the Met has a bias in collecting from such and such nation (at least i'm pretty sure, maybe less than the british museum ?). Anyway, I had a blast :).
The timeline is not readable on narrow desktop windows (e.g. when you have two windows tiled side-by-side, but not so narrow as to switch to the mobile layout). The labels for the years overlap each other so it's very hard to read.
I love this! One of the wrong answers was because I mis-clicked the location. Another one had an inscription saying "1695" and I confidently picked that time bracket (was very wrong!).
Mis-clicks are the real UX bug here, not the dating guesses. We had the same problem with a location picker on a job site years back, half our support tickets were fat-finger taps on mobile.
Wonderful - thank you to the creator! Requests, just in case you are reading:
* Make hints that prompt thinking and teach analysis (interesting!), not give answers (boring). For example, for the Inca ceramic depicting corn: 'The object depicts something familiar to you - where and when would that have been familiar to the people who made and used this?'; or for a silk painting, 'Where and when do you find these materials?'.
* Minor issue - The distance measurement is a bit unfair. Even if you figure out one is from (e.g.) China, getting the exact spot wrong is more costly than choosing the wrong spot in (e.g.) Italy because China is so much larger. I even placed the 'Ferry' fan on the Yangtze river, but it's a long river. Also, the map projection distorts distance.
How could anyone figure out the provenance of that rectangular gold object with the four semispheres?
Gold has been widespread and doesn't narrow it down much. I wondered if its abstract-ish design might be modern, but then it didn't seem worthwhile to the Met and I decided it might just be practical (I was somewhat right about practicality). I guessed that the fastners on the back were were post-Middle Ages.
Disagree that this tests historical knowledge. It mostly rewards pattern-matching artifact style to region, same skill you'd use guessing GeoGuessr coordinates from foliage. Interesting game, just don't confuse it with expertise.
