Being the only avenue to rating Google Earth on Backloggd - and a valuable VR experience in of itself - Google Earth VR is the crown jewel of Google Earth itself and one of the mechanical, symbolic and aesthetic touchstones of internet culture, as well as human technological achievement.

The gameplay itself it simple, you merely explore a digital photomontage of the Earth. It sounds boring on a glance - and to some it might be boring - but to me it is the ultimate gameplay in a way. As someone who tends to value mechanical richness and discovery in games this is a great example of that. Though it takes most of its appeal from being the Earth, exploring the Earth is still gratifying. Everything you see is part of the divine tapestry of our world. Every field, every tree and every mesa every rock and every mountain has been formed by winds and shifting plates for billions of years and every city and town nests a rich cultural heritage entirely its own. You could look around for hours at every brick of every building, the people walking about - the minutae of their lives and the sweat they all pour into the cultural, economical, etc. heritages of their communities frozen in this one moment forever. Ironically, it's the kind of game that makes you want to stop playing it out of sheer reverence for the world. If you think about it too deeply it makes you want to run out of the house, kiss the grass in your yard, scream at the sky and the moon and the stars and feel the sheer cold wind on your face and hair. It makes you want to feel the joys and pain of everyday life, as Google Earth submerges you into them.

Around the time I began to enter this phase I began to become fascinated with pain, with viscera. I haven't gotten to BME Pain Olympics levels or anything like that, but I find a unique comfort and return to primal instincts when I come across pain in my life. Pain and Google Earth are the same in this way, both humbling experiences that may seem unpleasant on their surface but can rather serve to connect us with who we were, and who we all are.

I could probably drool about the mere concept of this game forever, but for your sake and mine I won't because the construction of this game is equally insane as well. Technically it may not marvel - accounting to not a whole lot more than a well-positioned photo montage, the fact that we have enough photos of the Earth to perform an undertaking like this is wild. So many places, so many angles that people may never even look at. Do you ever see anyone in New York City look up at the skyline from below?

Maybe I'm looking into this too much, but Google Earth feels unique to me. The appeal of Google Maps I can see, but Google Earth feels born of passion alone, from end to end. A quest to photograph the Earth and keep it in our digital archives. And there is something beautiful about that. Something beautiful about how we can all look at it from the comfort of our couches. It's a small world, I suppose.