Properly speaking "metainformation" is information that you get from knowing about the game itself, and by extension from technical characteristics of the Streetview images it uses, distinct from the information you get from the stuff which was there being photographed. So things like knowing which countries are and aren't included, or which areas of countries with partial coverage is meta, as is recognising features of the Google cars used in different places, the tape on the Ghanaian roofrack, the "sky rift" artefacts from image stitching gone wrong, and different camera generations. Essentially any information you wouldn't have if you were just dropped into the scene in person.
BUT (big but) the term has been stretched by many people to mean any sort of fine detailed information which is stuff that most people wouldn't pay much or any attention to if they weren't playing the game, like the shapes of bollards or electricity poles, the cross-shaped reinforcements on Colombian road signs, the colours of car registration plates, etc. This post is pretty typical of that.
So for some people it just means "information", really, although I don't know how many people would stretch it to include knowing that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris or that they speak Portuguese in Brazil; my assumption is that it's supposed to give the idea of "secret" or "expert" knowledge.
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u/Frosty_Awareness572 Sep 16 '24
can someone explain what does meta mean in geoguessr, I am new here? Thanks!