Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch built a DOOM captcha that requires you to finish off three bad guys in Nightmare mode to prove that you’re human. According to Hackaday, the DOOM captcha is built as a WebAssembly app, which is ideal for graphics rendering, video processing, and gaming right on your browser.
However, since this is just an app on a browser and you likely want to retain the use of your mouse for switching windows, you’re limited to using the arrow keys for movement and the spacebar for firing your weapon (just like one of our editors had to back in the 1990s). Jumping around to dodge and using your cursor to look around is, unfortunately, not allowed. You could use cheats like IDKFA (all keys, weapons, ammo and 200% armor) and IDDQD (God mode), though, to increase the fun and your chance of survival.
By default, the captcha gives you 50 ammo, 0% armor, and 100% health to finish the required deed, which can be quite difficult. One technique we’ve discovered to prove your humanity is to hang back and let the enemy come to you. Once you’ve got them in sight, blast away with your weapon, which is quite effective even at a distance.
The DOOM captcha will give you some nostalgic fun while proving that you’re a real person. However, it might also end up frustrating for non-gamers, especially as you need some level of hand-eye coordination to get the required kills to get past the captcha. On the other hand, this might also serve as a good gatekeeper, especially if you don’t want non-DOOM gamers to visit your page.
There is little to no chance that you’ll get hooked on the DOOM captcha, as it will automatically end once you get the required three kills. It’s also unfortunate that it only uses one level, so you’re just repeating the captcha every time you enter a page that uses it. It probably would’ve been better if Rauch used Stable Diffusion to build a unique level every time the DOOM captcha loads, but then you might get distracted enough and get stuck playing the captcha instead of doing real work.
On the other hand, we’re also unsure if this would be an effective actual tool for weeding out bots and proving your humanity. After all, we’ve seen some researchers train AI bots to play DOOM and those could even outperform the average FPS player. Nevertheless, this might be more than enough to stop a crawler from accessing your page, especially as it might not know how to respond when asked to “kill at least 3 monsters.”
