Doom on a CAPTCHA is the most frustrating though admittedly raddest way to prove your humanity to an algorithm

What difficulty are you on, Doom CAPTCHA ? I want to know because I need to know how bad to feel about myself. Six times I’ve tried to pass your FPS test by killing three monsters to prove I’m human. Six times I’ve failed.

For thousands of years, people have asked what it means to be human. It turns out it was never a philosophical issue after all. It was, I’m gutted to report, a skill issue all along.



It’s a fun concept, nonetheless, although it doesn’t really have the same effect removed from the context of an actual website. If I’d encountered it after trying to log on to do taxes, for example, it’d really stand apart from the usual fare asking you to identify all the buses you’d most like to lick or whatever. Sadly, you’re unlikely to see this one in the wild, as it’s really just an elaborate advertisement for frontend-as-a-service product Vercel (thanks for the spot, TechCrunch ).

It’s also one that’s been done before, albeit in a different form that I actually found far more playable. As is customary whenever Doom On A Thing occurs, I must now list all previous instances of Doom On A Thing RPS have covered in the past. Partly to uphold tradition, but mostly to spur on venomous comment discourse over what really counts as ‘running’ Doom.

Ahem: Balatro , Fortnite , an electric toothbrush , your lawnmower , Teletext , a jailbroken tractor , a Nintendo Game & Watch , a pregnancy test , gut bacteria , and rat neurons in a jar . The first person to write a narratively cohesive short story using all these objects gets a nice biscuit. The biscuit cannot run Doom.

Yet..