The world's first 'standardized gaming test' will see if you can beat an '80s adventure game without a walkthrough—and it'll even monitor you over a webcam to make sure you don't cheat

Kids in school taking a test — (Image credit: Sega)

Not to sound like an old coot (though I am) but there's at least one aspect of gaming that used to be a lot harder. If you got stuck on an adventure game puzzle in the 1980s, you couldn't just ask the entire world for help: the internet hadn't been invented yet. You just had to bang your head against that puzzle until you figured it out—the closest thing to the internet was the occasional pay-per-minute hint line or asking the developer for help via mail. Not email, old-fashioned mail.

If that wasn't bad enough, '80s adventure game puzzles were notoriously illogical and you'd have to twist your brain into a pretzel to figure these darn things out. Today, with puzzle solutions just a Google search away, it's difficult to experience that true desperation.

I know it sounds like a cute experiment, and it is—but it's also not kidding around. "To ensure no walkthroughs or other outside sources are consulted during play, we will be utilizing college exam proctoring software, which will monitor your smartphone usage and browser activity."

I was able to get an advanced look at the AGAT this week, and I can confirm: funny as this sounds, it's legit. Woe Industries has built a website that indeed hosts an actual 1980s adventure game (I will not say which one) and uses actual proctoring software called AutoProctor that (using AI) watches your face through your webcam and monitors your browser window to make sure you're not looking away from the quiz to find answers or using another browser tab to search for a walkthrough.

It's not the first, either. Woe Industries has developed some funny and interesting browser games over the years, like FromSoft Word—it's like Microsoft Word but if you make a typo, you die—and Myst FPS—it's Myst but you shoot a lot of stuff, too. For the AGAT, they're really going above and beyond.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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