Look at Me. I’m the CAPTCHA Now.

The smallest but most persistent indignity of our current digital age is the way we have all, every one of us, been press-ganged into service as human CAPTCHAs. You know, the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, as tortured an acronym as ever there was. How many bicycles are there in this image? Is that a stop sign or merely a reflection of a stop sign? Is this story real or fake? The computer can’t tell the difference. Which means you can’t ping your lost iPhone without decoding the golem’s underlying logic. Kasper Lapp, it seems, fashions games with my discomfort as their first design principle. First it was That’s Not a Hat. Now it’s Totally Human. I dislike Totally Human. But at least I dislike it for reasons that mark it as a very interesting game indeed. Uh oh. I’m an alien. No worries. I’ll just have you for dinner. Imagine this. Your society, previously flawed but functional enough in principle, has been overrun by aliens. Aliens who eat…