I was already beginning to suspect that I am, in fact, a robot, given my historic ineptitude when it comes to filling out reCAPTCHAS. It's the ones where you need to click all the squares of a bicycle or whatever that catch me out. There's always one tiny bit of wheel or handlebar that the system can never decide whether it counts as a bicycle or not, and I go from simply trying to access a web page to a full-blown existential crisis.
But my possibly synthetic brain was sent into overload by I'm Not a Robot, the latest browser-based caper by game developer and Internet mischief maker Neal Agarwal. I'm Not a Robot takes the Internet's reviled not-really-a-security-check and stretches it to its most preposterous limits.
The first few levels of I'm Not a Robot are straight remakes of reCAPTCHAS (a re-reCAPTCHA, if you will). Click the button to declare your status as a sentient organism, type out some swirly letters, and select all the squares that contain a Stop sign (which, of course, I failed at). But things take a weirder turn once you're asked to start selecting vegetables from a mixture of fruit, veg and, well, you'll see.
Before you know it, I'm Not a Robot is adding full-blown word searches into its reCAPTCHAS, having you play a game of Tic Tac Toe against an AI, and trying to tell the difference between chihuahuas and blueberry muffins. There are some great jokes hidden among them, particularly level 11, which folds in another classic game of identification into the mix.
I made it as far as level 17, which requires you to draw a circle with 94% accuracy. Turns out I am really bad at drawing circles with a mouse. The closest I got is 92.2%, aka "squashed satsuma". In my defence, I'm Not a Robot only lets you move your mouse so slowly, which makes drawing the circle more challenging. Even so, I am now ashamed of being bad at something I didn't know it was possible to be bad at, which is what videogames are all about!
I'm Not a Robot is hardly Agarwal's first game that stretches a humdrum part of the Internet to absurd extremes. Mollie Taylor was driven to distraction by The Password Game a couple of years back, which requires players to come up with passwords according to increasingly demanding parameters. More recently, Jonathan Bolding yielded his brain to a tsunami of Internet nonsense in the perfectly pointless Stimulation Clicker.
While Agarwal's reCAPTCHAs are as baffling and annoying as the real thing, it's worth noting that they're considerably more benign. A study conducted in 2023 revealed that reCAPTCHA's are nothing more than 'a tracking cookie masquerading as a security service' which has generated nearly $1 trillion in revenue for Google. And all it cost me was my grasp on reality. Isn't the Internet fun?
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