The World Game

Can the world meet on one web page?

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My name is Hanan Cohen. I am an Internet Activist from Israel. You can read more about me in my English homepage.

I write shitty software...with bugs! Please be aware that this is a game and it is not intended to be 100% accurate. Thanks for your understanding.

I have created the World Game as a project for the 2006 GeekCon.

The game was announced in the opening session of GeekCon on Friday 7th, 2006 and will run for a week. After that, the game will become static and will not record new information.

The idea came to me when I saw Visited Countries at the website of Douwe Osinga.

For this site, I use the free and open source GeoLite Country by MaxMind. Thanks.

Another thank you goes to Uri Baruchin who gave me some good advice on how to make this site more viral. Let's hope it worked.


How the list of countries was formed (and why being angry about it might make personal sense to you but you should also realize that no political decisions were made by me in creating it).

The basis for the countries list is taken from the UN Statistics Division that can be found here :
Composition of macro geographical (continental) regions, geographical sub-regions, and selected economic and other groupings

The names that are used in the game are the official UN country names.

From this list, several countries were taken out because the MAXMIND database cannot detect them:
  • Guernsey
  • Jersey
  • Saint Pierre and Miquelon
  • Timor-Leste
  • Western Sahara
  • Saint Helena
  • Pitcairn
  • Isle of Man
  • Wallis and Futuna Islands
After that, several "countries" were added because the MAXMIND software can detect them but they are not on the UN list:
  • British Indian Ocean Territory
  • Reunion
  • Taiwan
  • Heard Island and McDonald Islands
  • United States Minor Outlying Islands
Also, some countries were grouped together because the MAXMOND software cannot differentiate between them:
  • British Virgin Islands or United States Virgin Islands
  • Montenegro or Serbia
To sum things up: This list of "countries" is actually a list of geographical entities.

Again, no political decisions were made by me in creating it.