What if, to prove that you are not a robot, you played DOOM ? It’s the idea of a developer who created a Captcha that requires you to kill monsters to connect to a service.
Solving a Captcha is often painful. Associating images, finishing a puzzle or entering numbers and letters, nothing very original, but not always that easy. What if you played a video game instead, like Doom ? After all, the most famous FPS works on anything. The proof: the iconic video game has become a Captcha, to which you can “ play » at this address.
A Captcha that makes you play Doom
The idea comes from Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel, an agency that produces websites. He wanted to offer a new way to complete a Captcha. The idea is to play at a level of Doom by killing three monsters, while avoiding getting killed. All in fashion Nightmarethe most difficult in the game. This is not the first time that we see a Captcha with Doom : PCGamer talked about another similar system a few years ago.
The developer managed to adapt Doom in WebAssembly, using the Emscripten tool. This is what makes it possible to move from the C language (on which the original game works) to JavaScript (used very widely on the web and for Captcha). In addition to that, it is even possible to play it on the phone. In just a few days, more than 344,000 games were played, more than 280,000 monsters killed and more than 60,000 victories, according to Guillermo Rauch. That’s a winning percentage of 17.5%: that’s not much.
It’s not that easy
We tried the “ game » to the editorial staff, and we recognize that it is not that easy. From the start of the level, we get shot and several watches want us dead. Especially since the message when we win is disappointing: “ Captcha solved! Try again ”, on a white background.
As noted TechCrunchon the forums of Hacker Newsmany developers complain about the difficulty. What if that was the merit of this captcha? Be so difficult that you really don’t have to be a robot to complete it? Maybe in some time some stubborn developer will create a bot that will play this level of Doom to validate the Captcha.
Tech
