\jeff{krimmel}

Fastr: A Game Built On Flickr

I recently stumbled on a new game to which I am quickly devoting fives of minutes out of my day. This new game is called Fastr, and it is built on Flickr, the popular photo sharing website.

First, I should briefly describe Flickr. People submit their photos to the Flickr servers, and random Internet passers by can drop through and search for photos of whatever they would like. The key tools that allows this searching process to happen is the use of tags. The submitter of the photo gives a list of keywords they want to associate with the given picture. For example, someone may have posted a picture they took of some of their friends at a Dodgers game. The photo might have tags of “baseball”, “Dodgers”, “buddies”, “stadium”.

The game Fastr starts by choosing a tag that is unknown to the players. Fastr then uses this tag to harvest ten pictures. One picture is displayed every three seconds, with the first picture remaining visible as the second picture is displayed next to it, and so on until ten pictures are visible. The point of the game is to guess which tag Flickr is using to find these pictures. If you guess the tag after viewing the first picture, you get 10 points. If you guess the tag after viewing the first two pictures, you get 9 points. The trend continues through the end where you don’t guess the tag after the tenth picture is shown for three seconds, and then you get 0 points.

Sometimes the tag is very simple to guess. An easy one that I can remember was “ninja”. The very first image is obviously a ninja and nothing else. I guess ‘karate’, I see that’s not right, and then I guess ‘ninja’. The game tells you if you got it right as soon as you complete the word, so if you type ‘karate’ and nothing happens, you just backspace and try another word.

The hardest tag for me to guess so far? “Young”. Four of the ten photos ended up being of young women, one was of a baby lizard, and I don’t remember the others. But I don’t think anyone playing got it right (you can see the scores of the other players while the game goes on).

I was thinking about this game a little bit, and I quickly realized this is a perfect example of a game at which it is very difficult for me to imagine a computer ever beating a human. Computers can beat humans at all sorts of mathematically-based games (chess immediately comes to mind), but viewing images, and then trying to draw patterns from a sequence of displayed images…computers wouldn’t stand a chance.

It’s a fun game.