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.

You may have watched quite a number of stop motion videos before, but this one is one of the most professionally made ones I’ve ever seen. Created only by streaming together a lot of still photos, this video features nearly 5 minutes of media content, I wonder how long it took the producer to film it.

To those old school gamers out there, this video especially brings you back to the old times with homages to many arcade classics like Pong, Snake, Tetris and Pac Man. Poor new-gen console controllers won’t be getting much of their owner’s attention though.

I’m not an online gambler or anything, but recently I’ve been hooked on to this Online Texas Hold’em Poker variant at gpokr.com. Developed by Ryan Dewsbury (who just happens to be from Toronto), gpokr distinguishes itself from other online poker sites in that it doesn’t use flash as the platform for the game. Instead, it’s built using AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, using the Google Web Toolkit SDK. Being run only on a Javascript based applet, this means that basically all browsers out there support the game and that no flash installation is required when you’re running on a public computer (*hint* say at work maybe?).

Having been released only for a little more than two months, the player population has already increased exponentially. I especially admire the efforts of Ryan in that the site is constantly, and very very frequently, updated with new features such as player social networking, win chart, different betting tables etc… improving the gaming experience for the users every single day, making the site very progressive in a sense.

While you only play with virtual money in the game, and can refill your chips whenever you go broke, the exhilaration of holding a straight in your hand and going all-in is as exhilarating as ever. While I don’t encourage online gambling, Gpokr is a fun, costless and addictive ajax game that will let you challenge your guts. So drop by one of the tables, in fact drop by MY table (the retrochronix table. Yup, it’s named after me cause I rock!), and check out my profile to compare how well your bluffing skills are against mine!