I was already beginning to suspect that I am, in fact, a robot, [[link]] 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.
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 [[link]] 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 [[link]] 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?
