If you're too young to know about this, the following says it all: Leisure Suit Larry was a 16-color "adult adventure" game. Of course, having only 16 colors and very low resolution (see above), the "adult" content was, let's just say, not very detailed.
I can barely remember the actual game, but one thing that I never forgot was the age verification system to prevent kids like me from playing. You basically had to answer a series of questions that the authors figured only adults would know, such as things that were on the news ~12 years before the game was created:
Without having the Web or Google, these tests were very difficult for a kid like me, so I spent hours and hours trying to guess the answers or looking them up in encyclopedias. (Later I found you could simply press Alt-X to skip the test!)
My question is: can such an age test be created today? It would be useful, for example, to figure out that a user is too young to visit a porn site or too old to visit a children's site (think pedofiles). The biggest difficulty, of course, is the existence of search engines. So, the requirements for such a test are:
- Speed: The test should take less than 2 minutes.
- Accuracy: Most people's age should be classified correctly.
- Search Engine Resistance: Somebody with access to a modern search engine should not be able to fake their age. This should be true even if another person posts the exact answers they entered when they took the test.
I understand there are many potential complications and I'm willing to concede that no test will reliably differentiate between somebody who is 17 years and 11 months old, and somebody who is 18. But I still think that such a test is plausible. For example, there are differences in color preference between younger and older people. Another possibility is asking users to identify the person in an image: kids will correctly identify Hannah Montana, whereas adults will correctly identify Barry Manilow. A large enough collection of these could do the trick, since modern search engines don't allow searching for a particular image.
Wouldn't it be awesome to have to identify, say, Pee-wee Herman before watching your porn?
word/picture questions + machine learning/human computation for the win
ReplyDeletePotential Question Candidates (answers listed from young-old):
ReplyDelete1. Santa Claus is real:
a. True
b. False
2. Li'l Wayne is:
a. Awesome
b. Trash
c. Damn kids with your Rock and Roll!
3. The most dominant soccer country is:
a. Italy
b. England
c. Get off my lawn!
High pitch sound or noise
ReplyDeleteOnce you create the obscure questions you give extra value to that information, so as quickly as you can come up with them, they'll get added to 'ageverificationanswers.com'
ReplyDeleteah, I loved that game. I wish I could play it again. You could walk into a casino a listen to a stand-up. Is it in flash somewhere?
ReplyDeleteG
Don't forget that questions will have to be culture fair. If you want custom from people in Europe then the question above would stump them. It's too american.
ReplyDeleteHow will you take care of people from different continents and iq level.
ReplyDeleteThe point about culture is a good one. Any test developed should take this into account.
ReplyDeleteNot sure it would work but as someone who use to run porn sites for a number of years I can say that I wish there was something.
ReplyDeleteI'm so tired of parents keep bitching about their kids and porn you know what I'm not in your house and I watch my kids at mine.
I would think having to identify Pee-wee Herman before watching my porn would be counterproductive. I'm not sure that I would be interested in watching porn after that, though I'm suddenly craving some popcorn.
ReplyDeleteOne problem I find with these tests is that these tests must be distributed. Having these tests must either be a law or there must be an incentive for porn sites and games to implement them. Unfortunately, as much as it seems like a great idea, I don't think it could be a law because there is always the slightest chance that someone who is over 18 will fail. Also, implementing this (although may not be expensive) does cost money primarily because the test needs to always feed different questions to the user (or else someone in the forums can easily accumulate all the answers to questions and make a comprehensive list and searching in that list would take mere seconds..) and there is nothing they gain from implementing it.
ReplyDeleteALT-X?! Oh dear - I spent HOURs compiling a cheat sheet, looking up encyclopedias, eventually getting into data mining some 10 years later.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Pseudo porn led me to mine data.. hehehe. Some motivation.
I had a book that had a quiz like that a few years ago, but mostly with common appliances. For example, shown a picture of a kitchen appliance you were asked to identify it as:
ReplyDelete(a) an icebox
(b) a refrigerator
(c) a fridge
Porn sites so boring here is a trick on how to AVOID PORN from being browsed by kids
ReplyDeleteEnter Verificage, a company which provides biometric age verification using a kind of fingerprint reader that looks at physiological properties of finger bones:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.verificage.com/
Having these testts must either be a law or there must be an incentive for porn sites and games to implement them. Unfortunately as much as it seems like a great idea, I don't think it could be a law bacause there is always the slightest chance that someone who is over 18 will fail.
ReplyDeleteLol, Guatemala - Good luck to them finding your friend!
ReplyDelete