A few years ago, a flash game called the ESP game popped up around the net. It was a brilliantly designed idea by students from Carnegie Mellon University in that it makes people want to do work for them for free. So what was the work? Tagging images on the internet with an appropriate tag.

The basic game idea was that two random players on the internet are hooked up together through the program and are displayed the same image without anything else. With no method of communication, both players were to try and type the same word into the text box to score points. The players are then rewarded with entertainment and satisfaction by getting more tags entered correct, while secretly behind the scenes, every image tagged by the players are named accordingly. This way, not only were the images guaranteed to be correctly named, they were done for free by thousands of willing people.

Fastforward back to the present, as in Google’s usual attention to web accessibility, they launched the Google Image Labeler game recently that performs more or less like the ESP game did. So if you have one and a half minutes to spare, and are willing to become free labour for Google, I highly recommend you to try out this image labelling game and ponder upon how clever people are to have thought of such evil ways of exploiting bored online souls.