On a slightly more serious note, this is awful for anyone who has mouse dexterity issues, like older or inexperienced computer users, those using assistive devices, or even people with shaky hands. It also relies in some places on culturally specific assumptions (for instance: put toppings on a pizza... I see some squiggly reddish stuff which seems like it's meant to be bacon, but in the UK bacon doesn't look anything like that!)

Good on them for trying to make the CAPTCHA experience more interesting, but this isn't quite a complete solution...

http://akismet.com/

The clit mouse is designed to be used by touch typists. You don't have to leave the home row to use it (use your thumbs to click).

If you handle it with the index while the other fingers of that hand rest on the keyboard (so that your hand is fixed), it becomes very precise.

I used to find it completely unusable until I finally discovered the proper way to use it (probably when I started to touch type) which was quite an epiphany. I wanted to share just in case you hadn't yet discovered it.

Having a decent cap on the thing also helps: my first TrackPoint (about ten years ago) was on a third-hand laptop, and the rubber had decayed to the point where it was squishy and sticky. Not very pleasant to use :)

However, that solution does not work for everyone. There are those who use smartphones, tablets, or are stuck behind corperate networks that (cannot/will not) allow you to even view or interact with the game.

I love the idea of not having to type in captcha's all the time, but the solution will have to be a universal one; making it easier for the user to verify they are human, while still keeping all the bots out.

In the meantime, at least recaptcha is doing something useful with the time we spend figuring out the captcha's.

Can you elaborate? What do you mean they are doing something useful? I'm not familiar with how recaptcha works but, I have used it on many sites before.

(Thanks!)

More at http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

Sory, I should have tossed a link in when I made that comment.

There are always two words that you will see. One that is known, and the other is unknown.

Once enough users (lets use 10 for this example) type the same responce to the unknown word (and correctly identify the known word), the unknown word will move to a known status and be matched up with a new unknown word.

Thereby digitizing books! (ever wondered why one of the words is clearer than the other? Now you know!)

* It's called a game but it's just not fun. (Tried about 6 of them.)

* It's annoying to have to use the mouse in 2 dimensions with dragging. This activates the "locate, identify, capture something and drag it someplace else that needs to be identified" part of my brain. Using that part of the brain breaks my train of thought from the message I was thinking of typing.

Captchas are not perfect, and this is a good idea to try and do user testing, but I find it not be an improvement over captchas.

Most of the "games" seems to be "pick 2 out of 4", which gives you only 7 permutations. But it's worse that that, since you can just keep on trying until you find a match.

http://areyouahuman.com/advertisers

After all, I don't want any form of advertising or tracking on my website due to 3rd party captchas.

I would looooove to see the numbers behind this.

These sort of clever/unusual human detectors can work great on a small scale, when it isn't worth anyone's time to attack them, but fall apart once they get popular. Maybe I'm missing some secret sauce here, but this one certainly looks like one of those.