You can get people do some pretty strange things when it comes to playing games. I can’t imagine anyone who would consider tagging images to be “fun” — even when tagging my own images for personal use, it gets boring rather quickly. Yet, when placed within the context of a game, suddenly, these boring chores become fun. You almost have to wonder, what other kinds of things can you get someone to do in the name of fun and entertainment?

Google Image Labeler is a multi-player game that involves two people who are shown the same series of images and then asked to come up with as many descriptive words and phrases about each image as possible. The players don’t see each other’s answers, but they do see when they match answers. The goal is to match as many answers about the images they are shown as possible within a certain amount of time. Using the image of a large, evergreen tree as an example, let’s assume I enter the word “tree” while my partner enters the word “bagel”. Obviously, no match, there… but if my partner does eventually enter the word “tree”, we score a match and move onto the next image until time runs out. After time runs out, we are given a quick look at each other’s answers and then are given the choice to begin again. Scores are tallied and the best scores go up on a leader board to encourage others to keep playing in an attempt to best the top scores. Now, as fun as that may or may not sound, the really interesting part is what’s going on behind the scenes and just exactly why Google created this game in the first place.

A few years ago, Google began offering users the ability to search for images and photos alongside web pages and on-line documents. The problem was, how was the search engine to know what an image was an image of? Aside from the filename, there was really no way to gain any sort of context about what was in the image except to have someone look at the image and come up with as many descriptions of the image as possible. Using the example image of a large, evergreen tree, fitting descriptions like “large”, “evergreen”, and “tree” would be sorted into a database with pointers to that image so that people who searched Google for images with the phrase “large evergreen tree” would get an image of a large, evergreen tree. Of course, there are a lot of pictures out there on the Internet and giving one person the task of coming up with labels for each and every one would not only be time consuming, costly, and difficult, but it would also be completely foolish. If anything, Google is not completely foolish. They decided, instead, to have us do it. That’s right – you and me. Through the sheer genius of a simple game, every player is helping to improve Google’s Image Search simply by playing along. We do it for fun, but we do it for free. It costs Google next to nothing to have a “staff” of thousands of people, constantly updating their database with more and more labels about the images it finds on the web. But what about slightly darker uses for this type of social engineering?

Chances are, if you’ve signed up for any kind of web-based service recently, you’ve come face-to-face with a CAPTCHA, a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. These simple devices are meant to keep spammers from using scripts to create multiple email, forum, and blog commenting accounts so that they can’t use these services to send out endless amounts of junk mail. So far, they’ve worked pretty well because the way they work is simple: during the sign-up process, the user is presented with an image of some text – letters and numbers – set against a backdrop of colors, patterns, and other types of “noise” meant to confuse scripts that can read text on an image. Most humans, however, can see right through this noise, and so CAPTCHAs almost guarantee that humans, and only humans, can sign up for these services. The only flaw is that humans can be easily tricked.

A recent post on the PandaLabs Blog revealed an application they discovered that looks like an interesting little game. An image of a scantily dressed woman invites you to play along with the promise that, for every correct answer, she’ll take off another piece of clothing. The more you play, the more clothing she removes. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work…. What’s actually going on is that, every time you play the game, the application begins the sign-up process for a new email account at Yahoo!. When it gets to the part of the sign-up process with the CAPTCHA, it sends the CAPTCHA image to you, which you then decipher and enter into a small form which gets sent back to Yahoo! and the process begins again. This happens so seamlessly that the user never really questions what’s going on; he, or she, just keeps playing the game – haplessly creating more and more spam accounts for the clever hackers to exploit. But does social engineering always imply that some sort of crime is taking place? What if you could get people to play a game that just might help end world hunger?

FreeRice.com is a word game that anyone can play for free; right in their browser. Like all the games I’ve mentioned so far, it’s very easy to play. You are presented with a word and must pick the correct definition of that word from a list of multiple choices. For each word you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated through the United Nations to help end world hunger. It works on multiple levels because it’s simple, fun, and you learn some new words along the way. But thanks to the advertisers who display ads on each page as you play, money is granted to buy rice to feed people all over the world. The game has been running since October 7, 2007 and has donated 1,330,639,890 grains of rice. It’s a great way to get people involved with something they might not otherwise take part in because it’s as simple as playing a game — proof positive that not all social engineering hacks are bad.