This is quite a neat game. If would be good if you could click the image to get a bigger version of the picture because you can't always tell what's happening in them.

Displaying the image four times does seem kind of unnecessary since everyone's viewing the same one. Perhaps if it was displayed once, it could be bigger.

[Edit] Perhaps there should be a hint somewhere asking for English-only captions for now too as I didn't know whether the Spanish (?) one I just saw was funny.

wow , finally.. i was "beta tester" and was so funny!
great game!

The rating stars should come out of the rater's avatar, not from an arbitrary location. It would be great if this game could be re-architected to become asynchronous as there's a lot of waiting around. It would probably be better without the random votes, which somewhat devalues the results.

But what an original and engaging idea!

Good for killing one's time! I've won two Karma now.

Nice game. I'm sure it's a lot of fun, but it depends on the other players. When I logged it, it was quite laaaame.

> It would probably be better without the random votes, which
> somewhat devalues the results.

Agreed.

Thanks for all the helpful feedback so far!

As for the random votes, we figured this feature would make sure "not voting" is no winning strategy. So if you don't vote, you won't increase the chances you get more votes than others. But maybe we can find a more optimized way to solve that...

It's been done – "INCIT," here at Forumwarz: http://www.forumwarz.com/

Small typo in the post, "You sit together together in..."

Cool concept! I tried playing a round at work and since YouTube is blocked, I couldn't close the youtube grey box that popped up. The [x] didn't do anything in the upper right hand corner.

> Small typo in the post, "You sit together together in..."

Thanks, fixed!

> I tried playing a round at work and since YouTube is blocked,
> I couldn't close the youtube grey box that popped up. The [x]
> didn't do anything in the upper right hand corner.

thanks, we'll see how we can work around this!

Very addictive! Will play often!

First of all the random vote system isn't too bad, but the draw random decision makes NO SENSE WHAT SO EVER. And the normal random voting won't help too much either as the user can still deliberatly vote for the worst caption.
   Aside from that it should be possible to change your name, for example my email is I dunno how many years old and back then I for some reason decided to start my email with website...gmail.com, what results in a nonsense username.
   Still a great game and one of the best ad implementation even though I hate how the ad is cut off in the middle. PS. I am not really into video ads, but I do realize that this isn't the standard video adsense ad.

Too many repeated images.

Nice game.. I'm rubbish at it, but it's nice ;)

It would be good if the title bar changed or flashed or something when the games starts. I seem to be waiting for other players quite a lot and just leave it open in another tab while I browse other sites. When I eventually go back to the site, I find the game's already started. (On one occasion, I've even been kicked due to inactivity or abuse reports because I did this.)

Ah, here's the Forumwarz link – thanks to Andy for the pointing it out to us: http://www.forumwarz.com/incit
Very interesting!

Good game!

Although one time I got this (Chrome/Vista):
http://cheesemonger32.googlepages.com/Error.png

I was still able to view the image by right clicking and selecting "Open image in new tab"

Similar to a DS Game called LOL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakushow

I love these simple games that are so much fun.

Thank you Philipp.

A couple of updates are in:
- vote stars will now be sent from the player position, as Roger suggested
- when you're waiting to find other players and the game doesn't start yet, and you put it in the background and browse in other windows, it will try to let you know when the game started, similar to Tony's concerns
- we added a link to a YouTube video to show the game play when you're not yet signed in
- some more smaller miscellaneous things :)

Update: you can now play with 6 players per room...

I have a flash site
i'm looking for the script who makes google ads with flash.
can you give me the link?

Some suggestions.

-Show 1 large version of the image.
-Instead of wasting a whole lot of time, start voting once everyone has entered a caption.
-Have "Games" so after say, winning 8 captions, you win the game.

Just a few ideas.

Thanks Dinger.

PS: You can digg now if you like the site :)
http://digg.com/playable_web_games/CaptionX_real_time_photo_captioning_game

I'm interested in how you setup the multiplayer architecture on App Engine, I'd like to do some similar games.

Ideas:
http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/geocoder/reversegame.html (guess the place, multiplayer)
http://imagine-it.org/google/profanegame.htm
http://imagine-it.org/google/wordhunter.htm

Maybe you can do a technical post about your datastore/memcache setup?

Pamela, I'll forward this to my friend Nikolai.