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[GDS] December 2010 "Time to Captcha that Holiday Spirit!" - Critiques

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sedjtroll
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Joined: 07/21/2008

Use this thread to post constructive critiques of the entries to the December 2010 Game Design Showdown entitled "Time to Captcha that Holiday Spirit!".

Evil ColSanders
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Joined: 12/08/2010
No critiques for

No critiques for anyone?
.
Well, I guess I'll start by giving one. Well, not so much a critique as it is something I noticed. How are points totaled? You start paired up, but you have to perform individual tasks, and even pair up with other players. Once a task is completed, how do you keep track of who got what points or if points are split? If they are split, what happens with odd numbers? Just a thought.

As for myself, I didn't realize that I didn't put "christmas words" for the captcha sticks. It was implied when I wrote it, but we all know we can't read each others' minds. I guess it would have helped if I added the little flavor paragraph like all the other entries. This was my first entry and I didn't bother looking at past showdowns. (Though November being skipped didn't help.)

williamj35
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Joined: 12/03/2010
Points

That's a good point, Evil ColSanders. I think my idea was that each member of the team should get all of the points for a joint effort, which means there is no need to split the score. As far as keeping track of score, paper and pencil might not work well when everyone is tied up, and a score track with tokens might get knocked about by all the scrambling.

So maybe chips? Those might get tossed around, too, though. Maybe that's part of the dexterity element: you have to build your stuff w/o knocking over your chip stack. :) Larger the lead, more precarious the stack.

rcjames14
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Seriously

I gave williamj35's entry 3 votes and evil colsanders 1 vote. Both entries appeared to me to present functional games that captured the absurdity of the CAPTCHA. Although functionality was nice, for me, I saw this whole challenge as not supposed to be taken seriously. I did not have the time to put together the graphics I wanted for this challenge, but I thought that the object of the design was to lampoon a system that a lot of people in IT deal with every day and members of this list have been forced to deal with over the past few months.

So, "Completely Automated Public Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart: Holiday Edition 2076" got the most votes from me precisely because it would be an untenable game. In my mind, I imagined a bunch of absurdly simple tasks being used to tell the difference between humans and computer by requiring the players to act in an outrageous, not entirely logical and highly complicated way. The reason that I gave "CAPTCHA CAPTURE" a vote was because I imagined a similarly absurd scramble. The design is a rather straightforward merger of scrabble and taboo. But, in my mind, I saw the captcha sticks being ridiculously difficult to read (like the kind we've had to deal with on this forum) causing a lot of frustration for players. So, it was not that Christmas themes were implied for me, as much as craziness and parody was implied.

Good job to both designers.

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