DoD has problems locating Damascus in new map quiz
As military actions against the Syrian government remains a hot topic of negotiations, it has inspired professional quizzers to ask people to pinpoint Damascus on an interactive map. The US Department of Defense has apparently encountered problems.
“Where is Damascus? The US and the UK (crossed out) are
probably to bomb it. Do you know where it is?” ask the
authors of the game, suggesting that players click on the map and
pinpoint the city.
A fresh map then appears, showing you how many miles away from
reality your answer is.
In general results show that people know the Syrian capital is
located in the Middle East and close to the sea.
The social media website usvsth3m.com, whose team created the
game, said in an analysis released on Friday that "More
than 50% of our players guessed within 200 miles."
However, government
departments’ results were traced and yielded some worryingly
inaccurate estimates.
“We…had 65 guesses from within the US Department of Defense,”
revealed the statistics. “57% got it right at the DoD,
compared to 64% in the [UK] Houses of Parliament [out of 139
guesses].”
While some British lawmakers seemed to be engaging in deliberate
self-sabotage, placing the country in the middle of the South
Atlantic Ocean, for example, it looked like the DoD employees
were making errors completely obliviously.
“The folks in the DoD haven’t gone for blatantly wrong places;
instead they’re still guessing all over the Middle East. We don’t
think they’re joking,” said the report released on Friday.
While it might be difficult to pinpoint a city on a blank map,
still “quite a few people knew” where Damascus was,
according to the game’s creators.
However, some accidentally picked the Black or Caspian Seas
rather than the Mediterranean Sea as touching its coastline.
“Many of these guessed somewhere in the Sahara Desert, or in
the Balkan states. Two people picked Siberia. One person picked
Texas. They were probably joking,” a team of Us Vs Th3m
wrote.
In total, more than 100,000 people played the game by the moment
the report was released, according to their figures.
