Roll20 is pretty cool (and my Scion campaign is a little creepy)

Of the four campaigns I'm currently GMing, only one of them is face-to-face. The other three all use Roll20 as an online host so I can game with friends in other states.

Roll20 is a pretty cool set of tools for running RPGs over the net. It's got audio, video and text chats, dice rollers and customizable tools (decks, charts, tokens, API scripts, etc) for automating your mechanics, and a virtual table top with live-updating for your maps and tokens. I'm pleased with it. It's still not quite as good as running a game in person, but the tools are good enough to almost consider using them instead of dice and minis at the tabletop. If you're going to be running a game online for some reason, I strongly recommend Roll20.

Here's a partial screen shot from yesterday's session.
The setting is Scion, but the rules are FATE. Tracking down a lead, the PCs broke into a Museum after hours. So I grabbed a map I found online of the Chicago Field Museum, and slapped it down on the virtual tabletop. The Curator of Antiquities had an eyepatch, so clearly that meant he was evil. :) They eventually caught him performing a creepy ritual with the bodies of mummified children, about which I had prepared a virtual handout with some disturbing images.

High Scoring Vulgarity

Last week while my wife was convalescing from a back injury, we tried out a new little video game. It's called Clockwords. It's a little bit like Scrabble or other word games, but with a timer element that is represented by a battle between a steam-tech robotic weapon system and invading insects. It's actually pretty cool. Here's a link. She was bedridden much of the week, but she could still shout words at me.

Fun game. Very different from the sorts of games we usually play.

The majority of words you spell score probably around 50 points of damage. But I got vulgar, and it paid off. :) 394 damage from "Vulgarity". The yellow "R" is what did it, it made the 4 bronze letters explode while the evil insects were crossing each others trails.

Skype / MeBeam Gaming

I've been doing a lot of Skype gaming lately - which is to say, I've been running an RPG campaign via the free online conference call features of Skype.

What I really like about it is that it's allowing me to game with friends in other cities and states. Given how bad I am at keeping up with normal phone calls, email, and letters, Skype is a godsend.

Originally, there were 5 players, plus GM, and due to social implosions, it has consistently been down to 2 PCs + GM. Prior to this campaign, I'd played in a few other Skype sessions, running up to about 8 players. Having tried several permutation, I can now clearly say that the ideal number of players for a skype game is 3. The further you push above that, the more the dynamic breaks down. "At an exponential rate" is probably accurate. Gaming with a large group always takes a bit of patience, as you don't get as much spotlight time as you might like -- but on Skype, this is seriously magnified.

The reason that Skype doesn't work well with larger groups, is that when one person is talking, there's no good way to butt in. If you interrupt them, neither of you can be heard or understood - it's one big audial mess. More often than not, they won't even hear you, and will keep on rambling. Since you can't see them, there's no subtle visual clues to let them know you want to butt in. This then drives people to use Skype's instant chat functions. The instant messaging seems simple and helpful at first, but quickly gets out of hand. Especially with a large group, which is almost guaranteed to end up with at least 3 or 4 chats happening simultaneously as people try "secretly" messaging one-another. Your attention gets divided, and sub-divided, and then sub-divided again. Everybody starts missing things, and it's impossible to get a good interactive scene of actual role-playing going.

A very frustrating experience, and at first I thought the only way around it was for the GM to micro-manage and be draconian. It was almost enough to make me quit Skype gaming, but luckily one of my players discovered something that would fix it.

For one-on-one calls, Skype has video, but the conference call function is audio-only. We quickly learned that you need video. Seeing the other players is how you know when someone else has something to add, and is bursting at the seams, but doesn't want to just rudely talk over you. It's how the GM knows if he's going overboard and boring the players at the peripheries of the scene. It's how you know you've lost someone's attention because their cat just vomited all over their desk, and that maybe you should pause the game for a moment while they clean up. Conveniently, there's a few easy video options out there. We've been using MeBeam. MeBeam is simple, and great for video. I've considered just switching over to it for the totality of the video-conferencing, because then we'd only have one program to worry about. The only thing stopping us is that sometimes mebeam audio ends up with excessive lag. Skype has less lag, but also crashes or disconnects more than MeBeam, so it's hard to say which is truly better. I'd say look into both (and maybe search the net for other options), and use whichever has the more consistent performance on your computers. But definitely use video of some sort, because the visual cues make it a much more nuanced and human experience.

Even with video, there's still some minor communication difficulties, as it is a little slower and more removed than actually gaming at the same table. I recommend using a very light rules system, and only gaming with people you trust. Now, honestly, I recommend that for in-person tabletop as well, so I may just have a personal bias. However, I've found that the technical hurdles of the various video conferencing programs make rules questions and arguments that much more annoying, so I try to use a system that minimizes them. Another option is to use a game system that has a solid online rules database. That way, since you're at a computer anyway, players can just bookmark the trickier bits and pop open a second browser window to look things up on the fly. Likewise, I'd choose a system with minimal die-rolling, so you don't have to worry about interfacing with some other die-rolling software, or rolling in front of the camera.

All this lead me to GUMSHOE for my online gaming. The system is transparent, almost invisible, during play, with rules questions almost never coming up. The few times that there is a rules question, they're generally about my Continuum-to-GUMSHOE conversion, not about the GUMSHOE core rules themselves. Die-rolling happens, but not with great frequency, and it's just a single d6 so repeated cheating would be easy to spot.

This post has gone on long enough, so I'll sign off for now, and return to the topic to talk about my specific campaign again at some future date.

Hooray again! And yet, I think I'm done.

When I got home last night, I popped onto my two online empires, and discovered I'd been attacked on Ogame. A real attack this time, not some accidental misclick with an espionage probe!

At first, I was thrilled! Just like last time.

I've been unable to attack anyone else - you're under "newbie protection" till you hit a certain point value, which means little guys can't attack each other (though it's main purpose is to stop big guys from smashing little guys into cosmic dust). Problem is that once you're out from under newbie protection, you don't want to pick a fight with someone way above you. You're such a small fish, you can't do a damn thing. So, you sit around building up defenses in hopes of one day being able to compete. There wasn't anyone near me (on the map) who was anywhere near my score, so I didn't have much to do. For a couple months, I could only attack inactive players. I'd been slowly giving up hope of it ever getting exciting, and was really looking forward to some measure of conflict. But I stuck with it for a while, in hopes that someone else would crawl out from beyond the newbie shield near me and we might start a puny little war.

Instead, I got pummeled mercilessly by some random guy ranked 500 places above me, whom I'd never interacted with before. The biggest ship in my fleet was a Battleship, which I had just unlocked, and only had two of. I was attacked by a fleet with 125 Battleships, plus 70 Bombers and a Battlecruiser, neither of which have I unlocked yet, and 15 cargo vessels to haul away the wreckage of my world. The fight lasted 3 rounds. I destroyed 2 of his ships in the first round, and then inflicted zero casualties in the 2nd and 3rd rounds. His surviving 13 cargo vessels (you'll note I didn't destroy any of his actual military units) made off with nearly 200,000 resource points from my world. (And in case it wasn't clear from the above: he destroyed every single ship and planetary defense I had at the world in question).

All of this without an opportunity to do anything - battles are completely computer-moderated, with targets chosen randomly round-by-round. You just get a battle report showing how much your fleet and planetary defenses failed to accomplish. I'd imagined some sort of excitement to come from an epic battle, but instead it felt like reading a spreadsheet. No oomph, no color, just a list of ships and "the attacking fleet did a total of 328,000 damage, of which 16,000 was absorbed by shields. The defending fleet did a total of 25,000 damage, of which 18,200 was absorbed by shields." Lame.

Worse, I never had a chance, and I have no capacity to strike back in any meaningful or productive way. My overall score is like 12,600 development points, and his is 181,000. He's got a lot more ships than me, twice as many planets, and much higher tech development. If I did nothing but build Battleships, it would take me a month and a half to build a fleet the size of his - and he'd have those 2 months to make more of the really big ships I haven't unlocked. A totally one-sided affair, and there's 400 players that out-rank him in our Universe. I spent every remaining resource in my "Empire" just rebuilding the defenses on the planet he blasted, and two of my three other worlds are every bit as vulnerable as that one was.

Now, I realize there's things I could have done to mitigate this disaster. I could have "fleet saved" - a strategy that involves constantly rotating your ships from place to place at slow speeds so they can't be attacked while you're away from your computer. I could have spent every spare resource on defenses so there'd be nothing stockpiled to make it worth a raid. Both of those sound tedious, and I wanted a game I could play for 10-20 minutes a day - which Ogame claims to be.

So, though it was an interesting experiment while it lasted, and kinda fun a couple days, I think I'm probably done with Ogame. It's a poor design. Too slow to get started, and too unbalanced once things start happening.

By contrast, I'll keep my x-wars account active, at least for now, as it still has me fooled into thinking there's some potential to enjoy the game for it's trading and starship-designing subsystems. It doesn't look as pretty as Ogame, but it's got more to do. There's various posts from the X-Wars moderators asking people not to attack the same target more than 20 times an hour, so I suspect it may have the same balance issues that Ogame does. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar painful disillusionment occurs at X-wars in a few more weeks, but for now it seems to be the more rewarding game.

OGame advice

I still can't make up my mind whether or not I like OGame. I pop over to it once a day to queue up new building constructions and research - it only eats up 10 minutes of my day that way, which is just fine, but I'm certainly not finding it exciting, nor am I really making much progress in the game. I feel like I've hit a plateau where the remaining meaningful advances are beyond what my planets can produce in 24 hours. So, instead, I just keep building more Gauss Cannons. Meh.

Today, some random new player contacted me, asking for handouts and advice. I'm still not really at the point of having excess (well, except Deuterium, on one planet) so I couldn't really spare any resources for him (well, I suppose "chose not to" is more accurate on the Deuterium, but the game has weird rules prohibiting charity and I didn't want to run afoul of them), but I did pass on some advice that I'd figured out, mostly in the forms of "here's what I'd do differently if I started over".

1. Start raiding Inactive players as soon as possible. To do so, you'll need Espionage probes, Small Cargo, and a Light Fighter or two. Inactive Players are the ones that have "I" or "i" next to their name in galaxy view. Lower case means inactive for a week, upper case means inactive for a month. Send an espionage probe first to locate planets with no current defenses. In the early stages of the game, quite a bit of your resource needs can be met by raiding defenseless abandoned players - you probably won't want to pick fights with active players till you've built up a bit.
2. Ignore the missile silo. It's a ton of expense, and not needed till much later when you're well established. I've built missile silos on all my planets, but never once needed one. It feels like a big waste of resources and fields, in hindsight.
3. The game's "fluff text" makes Deuterium seem like it's a big deal and really important, but honestly you don't need it hardly at all till later in the game. While I frequently lack the Crystal I need for a building or research, it's really rare that I'm out of Deuterium. In general, I keep my Metal and Crystal mines around double the level of my Deuterium Synthesizer, and it's only lately that that's been any issue at all. Crystal seems to be the biggest limitation to growth (at least at the point I'm at - that may change at the very top ranks of play)
4. It's gonna be a while before you need the Storage buildings. I built one early on, and it was weeks later before I needed it. So for now, save yourself the resources and hassle.
5. When you start spreading out to additional colonies, they won't need Research Labs. I built a couple of levels of Research Lab on my 2nd and 3rd planet, and now regret it. I actually dismantled the lab on one of them, which costs a little resources and time, but freed up more space for developing other buildings. Better to just build one big lab and ferry resources from the other planets over to fuel it. (At least that's better till you get the Intergalactic Research Network unlocked, which I haven't yet.)
6. Each planet has a particular number of available Fields, and each level of a building uses one up. If you colonize a crummy planet, it won't be able to develop very far. In the long run, you generally don't want to colonize planets with less than 150 fields. There's a terraformer that builds extra fields, but it takes a lot of resources and research to unlock it - I still haven't.
7. Aside from that, I'm afraid there's not much point (or benefit) in specializing your planets. It's much more effective to make sure every planet has metal, crystal, and deuterium mines. They'll all need Shipyards and Robotics Factories, too.
8. If you haven't checked out the OGame wiki, you should. It's got tons of info.

Not sure how amazingly wonderful any of that advice was, but I figure it's worth my saving here in case someone else asks. I suppose I could go put it on the OGame wiki... but I'm too lazy at the moment.

Hooray, I've been attacked!

I've been "playing" Ogame for weeks now. I use quotation marks, because nothing much has happened in the game. It took forever to even get to the stage where I could build a spaceship, then forever again till I could colonize a planet. Eventually my "empire" has grown to 4 planets, which are pretty self-sufficient and require very little time or energy on my part. The downside, of course, is that it is boring.

My interaction with other players has been very limited. I've raided some planets, but mostly just those of players who've been inactive for over a month and thus unlikely to retaliate. I'm such a late-comer to the Universe I chose, that most real players have a huge jump on me in terms of tech and fleet development, so it wasn't ever worth the risk of my attacking them. (I chose the game, and that universe within it, because some old buddies used to play there - but I haven't been able to find them on the rosters.)

A couple weeks ago, I got a single spammish "join my alliance or be crushed" message from some random player, but it didn't make me want to join him. At the time I thought "this game's been so boring, I look forward to him attacking." But he didn't, and after a few days it returned to be boring.

A google search for "better than Ogame" pointed me in the direction of a game called X-Wars. It's graphics and interface aren't nearly as pretty as Ogame, but it has a big plus in the form of getting to design your own spaceships. I started playing it a couple weeks ago... but I considered putting quotations around "playing" in that sentence. You get a sense of progress and accomplishment faster in X-Wars, so it seems more gamelike.

The last couple days I've been weighing in my mind whether or not to just bag Ogame and walk away. Then, early this morning, I got probed. Two of my planets were spied on by one player, and then a different player sent a single probe to suicidally attack one of my planets. The two players aren't in the same Alliance, however, so I'm not sure what the intention of the suicide attack was. If it were the same player both times, I'd assume the point of the probe was to create a small debris field around my planet. He could get a salvage fleet headed toward the debris, timed to arrive a few minutes after his attack fleet hits my defense fleet stationed there. But, since that same player doesn't seem to have previously scanned me, it's also possible he was attempting espionage and accidentally told the probe to attack instead (by mis-clicking).

To play it safe, I sent my non-combat vessels of the fleet elsewhere, loaded up with supplies from the endangered world. I then sunk just about all my remaining resources on the planet into beefing up my defenses there. Hopefully, if it is an attack, his fleet will find the results a lot less rewarding than he'd imagined.

Getting attacked like this was kind of exciting, but I won't know it's full impact till I see how this plays out. If it was an accidental attack, I'm back to the game being boring and non-interactive. If it's a precursor to a longer invasion, who knows. It may breathe new life into a game I was about ready to give up on. Or, he may crush me so badly there's no chance of recovery. Don't know which it will be, but I'm excited to find out.

Shorter Version of Glass Nebula

The Glass Nebula, my first PlayCrafter Game, had a few flaws. It was kinda long, and difficult, which would be okay if it wasn't monotonous. Despite having been around for a month, and several of my other games getting rave reviews, Glass Nebula had only 2 names on the high score list, one of them being mine. It was 21-levels long, and pretty tough. Late last week, I decided to fix that. I kept the original the way it was, but made a copy. For the copy, I trimmed it down to 8 levels.

Previously, there'd be three similar levels followed by a bonus level. It went in clusters like that, and the 2nd and third level of each cluster were kinda redundant. The new version features only the best level (not necessarily the most challenging) of each cluster and just a couple of the bonus levels. It's much shorter, plays faster, and isn't quite so repetitive. It's only been up for a weekend, but it's already got three people on the high score list, half as many plays as the other version got in it's first month, and someone out there clicked the "I like this" button. I'm thinking my edits were a good idea.

Mathilde, if you're reading this, thanks for the feedback that provoked me to edit and improve the game!

Here's the new and improved Glass Nebula (Short Version)

P.S.: I also made Big Bad Fly and SWAT vs Kaiju both a little easier than they had been. The final levels on those had been really tough, and only myself and one or two members of the PlayCrafter staff had beaten them before I made the minor edits that reduced the difficulty.

On Big Bad Fly, I added some health packs to the later levels where the rocket launchers get so dangerous. In some cases the health packs replace crumble blocks in the building walls, but I also added a few to formerly "dead" airspace that the player was unlikely to spend much time in previously.

On SWAT vs Kaiju I tweaked the final boss. He's takes a little less damage to destroy, and his second weakspot is possible to shoot with missiles now, whereas before you had to "trick" him into belching nuclear fireballs into his own weakspot. It also says "King of Monsters" in big letters, so you know you're on the final fight. Hopefully more people will get to the epilogue now.

More PlayCrafter good news!

Turns out my game "Big Bad Fly" won the latest contest at PlayCrafter! It's now one of the featured games that shows up all big at the top of the mainpage. I'm on cloud nine!

Update: I realized I didn't really say what the contest was. It was for the best game made in the 2-week period between Dec 25th and Jan 9th. All the games made during that time were automatically entered. The prize is getting my game at the top of their main page - it's not like I won money or a trip to Hawaii or anything lavish. It still makes me pretty happy, though.

SWAT vs Kaiju (and other Playcrafter news)

My latest game on Playcrafter is "SWAT vs Kaiju"

In the game you play a police helicopter, battling against various big ugly monsters of the sort you'd expect to see in a Godzilla movie. Each has a weak point you must shoot to destroy them - random body shots typically accomplishes nothing. They wave their claws at you, spit atomic fireballs, etc. It's kinda short, and not that great of a game, but it was fun making the custom graphics and setting monsters loose on downtown Seattle. It's worth taking a peek at and blowing up few levels just so you can see my monster designs. The two-headed spider-lizard is pretty neat.

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The "Attack Choppa" player piece is incredibly hard to build good games for on playcrafter. This was my third attempt, the other two games were so bad I never even published them.

The problem is lack of enemies. There's only one flying bad guy on playcrafter's default piece set - the UFO. It flies randomly. It's aim is horrible, with short range and a bullet that's hard to see. If you put more than one on the level, they'll probably kill each other before getting in range to kill you. Other enemies behave in completely non-airborne ways. Most are land-bound, so they're no threat to the Choppa. Those that are a threat generally out-gun the choppa, so level design becomes very trying. Unless you supply custom graphics, most bad guys seem out of scale with the choppa - such as spear-carrying giants that are bigger than the helicopter. Those that are essentially in-scale are top-view enemies, where the choppa is side-view. And then there's little oddities like the choppa can't turn around, only shoots forward, and is so wide you can't make a good maze for it. As I said, it's a really tough piece to build for, and I know because I tried three times and failed miserably twice.

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In hindsight, I should have made simpler monsters in SWAT vs Kaiju, and put some work into making custom city and population pieces. Killing the monsters is rather formulaic and unexciting once you figure out a couple of simple tricks. On most levels, you can stay pretty much out of harm's way and take pot-shots at your leisure. Someday, perhaps I'll make a sequel where you have to kill the monsters before they collapse buildings and kill innocent civilians. That'd be more exciting, and thus make for a better game.

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In other PlayCrafter news, they just trimmed down the Staff Picks list. It was well over 500 (I think it was over 900, but don't quote me on that), and is now down to just 140. So, at least 75% of the previous picks were purged. I'm assuming this means they've raised the bar on what it takes to get picked. Three of my four previous games made the list before, and all three are still on the list post-purge. My work makes up 2.14% of the list. Needless to say, I'm feelin' pretty good about that. It's a nice little ego boost. Thanks, PlayCrafter!

Apparently, I'm Addicted

There's other things I was supposed to do today, but instead I made yet another game on PlayCrafter. That makes four, for those who are keeping track at home.

(Two of which, by the way, are now on the Staff Pick list and have lots of peoples names on their scoreboards. That makes me happy.)

In my latest game, you're the Big Bad Fly blowing down the houses of the 3 Little Pinks. What, that's not how you remember the story?

It's Like Pinball

I made another flash game at PlayCrafter (this is my third). It's a much shorter, simpler game than the other two. Basically, I just tried to create a pinball game within the constraints of what tools Playcrafter has. It's a bit sneakier (and more involved) than it looks at first blush - you can do a lot more to affect your score than the first two levels might lead you to believe.

As with my other PlayCrafter games: if you enjoy it, please click on the ads, since I could eventually accumulate some revenue from it. Thank you!

Possibly the best flash game ever made

(No, it's not one of mine. What kind of self-absorbed pompous egotistical windbag do you think I am?)

It's called Gemcraft, available at Armor Games and Game In A Bottle. This holiday vacation, while mostly snowed in, Sarah and I played it's entire run. We won 168 battles, killing a total of 45,336 monsters. The game was good enough to spend all those hours. ...and it's even free.

It's kinda like the various Tower defense games, but spruced up with:

• something very reminiscent of the gem and socket system of Diablo II,
• a skill-point and experience system,
• a compelling story and a cool ending,
• deeper strategic decisions then most of the Tower Defense games,
• 48 tactical battlefields to fight over across the strategic map,

This highly addictive and satisfying game kicks some serious booty. Each individual level is 5 to 30 minutes, so you can cram in a quick battle between other diversions.

The only complaint I have is a minor thematic/flavor complaint: why do the monsters respect and obey traffic laws? (The answer, of course, is that they do so because it makes for better game play, but it's still a little goofy.)

Hibernation Infestation

I made another flash game via playcrafter. It's a cute little time waste, kinda like the other one in that regards. This one's not as girly - you blow stuff up. :) You're the computer of a spaceship, that's become infested by alien bugs. You have to use your automated defense systems to get rid of all the bugs. Don't let that description fool you, though - it's more of a thinker, not an action game.

O, what were they thinking?

O-game looks neat, but I'm upset I don't have a spaceship yet.

I mean, if you're billing your game as one of intergalactic conquest, you should be able to build your first spaceship, or other military unit in say ...less than 6 hours after you started playing. Don't ya think? Just strikes me as odd.

Lookie what I made...

I made this little flash game...





















My game doesn't make a lot of sense, and over all it's a tiny bit ...girly, I suppose, what with the non-violent, female main character, and a color palette that sometimes dips into pastels. But, it was fun to make (and hopefully you'll find it fun to play).

It's a dexterity / "skill" game, with some minor puzzle and timing elements. The main character has a little too much inertia, on purpose, to make it tricky flying around obstacles. She also lacks any sort of weaponry, so you have to rely on timing and manuevers instead of just killing everything in site.

PlayCrafter is a very cool site that gives you online tools for building games, which is how I was able to make that. PlayCrafter is pretty much a WYSIWYG Flash game creator. It's still in it's Alpha stage, so there's limitations on what types of games you can build with it, but it's expanding. If I had wanted to spend more time and energy, I could have uploaded my own graphics and customized things a lot more. It was kinda fun, so I might make another game with it later.

PlayCrafter is a free site, and a fun way to kill time (though, since it's new and populated by mostly first-time designers, most of the games aren't terribly polished just yet). The creators of games get 10% of the ad revenue generated by their games, so if you like the game, embed it somewhere, and/or click on the ads, okay? :) Thanks!

Boobs is 140 points

Not are, is. So is ass (in google image labeler). I hadn't realized that. I'd been undervaluing that portion of my vocabulary.

Saying "No" to Knighthood, I'm afraid.

My ol' buddy Brad has suggested I play Knighthood. He says I'd really like it. But, to play, you need a Facebook account.

A lame demo of Knighthood, with like NO VOLUME. Learn to use a microphone, dude!

I can definitely see how there could be some fun there, despite the lackluster promotional video that's only for those with super-senses. Brad swears its the best of the free online RPG -style games, but I'll never play, I'm afraid.

It's not just 'cause I have a myspace page I never use, and don't need yet another social network gathering dust. It's not just 'cause my wife talked me into plurking, and I don't want yet another way to waste time on line. It's that Facebook scares the crap out of me.

2 vids explaining why Facebook is the spawn of Satan:



Chances are, it's all blown out of proportion, but the consequences if it's not are serious enough that I'm just gonna play it safe and avoid facebook. Sorry, Brad!

Google Image Labeler Strategy Guide

So, I've tried playing google image labeler some more, and am getting increasingly frustrated with the idiots I've been paired with. Back when I first tried it a few months ago, I was scoring over a 1,000 points per game quite frequently. Now, it seems like I average 600. The big change since then is that's it's off Beta, which probably means there's an influx of people just finding out about it now.

Rather than just bitch about the noobs, I thought perhaps I could take a stab at making a useful Strategy Guide for the game. Before doing so, I thought it'd be a good idea to check if anyone else had already done so. There's probably some other articles on the topic out there, so I should read them first, so I don't just duplicate their work. Here's what came up on the first page of a search:

• Zach Whalen at Gameology explores Game Theory and how it applies to google image labeler. Not much useful there, but it is interesting. It suggests an ugly truth - the best (as in highest scoring) strategy for the game is the one that does the least to fulfill the function that the image labeler was intended for.
• Fczuardi made a Flikr gallery about his Sky-Man strategy which, it turns out, is not so much a strategy as a cheat. Again, this illustrates Zach Whalen's point that the highest scoring strategy for the game completely defies the purpose for which the game was invented.

So let's talk about that purpose / function for just a moment. Aside from being a light-hearted game, Google Image Labeler is a tool for labeling images to make them easier to find via Google searches. That much is obvious.
Here's what people aren't thinking about: If that function isn't being fulfilled, the tool is unlikely to be supported for long. There's no advertising revenue being generated when people play it, and it no doubt uses up server time and power. If it's not doing them any good, it might not stick around. So if you like the game, cheats like the Sky-Man strategy aren't necessarily a good thing.

I understand that not everyone plays for the same reasons, so for every strategy tip below, I'll give it three ratings: Score, Speed and Function. "Score" refers to the likelihood that the tactic will score you lots of points per entry. "Speed" refers to how quickly this lets you get a match, which sometimes does and sometimes doesn't result in high scores. "Function" refers to how well that tactic serves the games stated function of improving searches on google.

What follows is very much a rough draft:

Type as many things as you can think of. Score: High Speed: High Function: High
This strategy has a lot going for it, yet it seems most players of the game haven't mastered it. I'll often get paired with someone who enters a single label, waits 30 seconds, and then asks to pass without entering a single label. I'm always puzzled by this, since it seems to go against the goal of the game and even the most simple strategic analysis. While an unusual word is worth 2 or 3 times as many points as a more common word, it's still better to get a match than to do nothing at all. If there's a picture of a car, don't just type "car" and leave it at that - type car, hit return, type vehicle, hit return, type the color the car is, hit return, type what style of car it is, hit return, etc.

Type what you read: Score: High Speed: High Function: High
This is the amongst the best advice I can give: If the image has a word in it, type it. A lot of times you'll get logos or captions on the picture. Unless it's a very generic word (like "sky") you'll probably get over 100 points for it. If everyone gets in the habit of typing the words in the picture, it'll make matches happen quickly. And since the words presumably have something to do with the image, it performs the labeler's function quite nicely. I even recommend this tactic when you don't know what the word means - nobody will know.

Type fast. Score: Medium Speed: High Function: Medium
Never delete or edit. Score: Medium Speed: High Function: Low
The goal should be to type like a stream of consciousness. When a word enters your mind, type it immediately. There's no penalty for typing something that doesn't apply to the picture, except time wasted. Don't agonize over whether or not to type a particular word. I'm amazed how sometimes people will type just one label, and sit there paralyzed. Don't worry that you're typing something dumb, just type it. Don't worry that you're spelling is awful - if you know you spelled it wrong, hit return, and type it again. Don't delete, don't edit, don't worry - any of that will just slow you down. You'll get more points over the long term if you concentrate on speed over accuracy.

Retyping long or odd words: Score: Medium Speed: Debatable Function: High
If there's just one obvious answer, and it's not a word you spell daily, type it again. Chances are the reason you haven't matched on the really obvious word is that one of you has misspelled it. Cholesterol becomes cholesteral or hcolesterol. If there's an impass, and you can't imagine why they haven't typed the obvious, assume you made a typo. After the game you can examine your partner's unmatched guesses. I've frequently seen typos in those cases where someone entered a single word and just sat around without making a second guess. Seems like retyping could be a good tactic if it's taking a long time to get to a match. I've given this a "Speed: Debatable" rating because it's hard to categorize. While it's actually quite useful for speeding up a stuck game, you hope to be making matches fast enough that you won't have time to even consider this tactic. And retyping if you didn't actually make a typo could just be a waste of time.

Keep your mind in the gutter: Score: Medium Speed: High Function: Debatable
There's a great truism about the net that goes like this: "Until you've met them in person, assuming everyone you interact with online is a 15-year old boy." Guesses like "hot" and "boobs" get matches an alarming amount of the time. Whether such labels actually help towards the avowed function of the labeler is debatable. "Sexy" on every female under the age of 50 is probably not so helpful, but "Penis" or "Porn" on pictures that contain explicit imagery probably is. Fighting a moral battle against it will just lower your score, and suggests you lack a grounding in the reality of the net.

If all else fails, guess colors: Score: Low Speed: High Function: Low
"Red dress" will score two or three times as many points as just "red" does, but it's a lot more likely to make an instant match. I tend to save simple color words for later, never starting with them, but there's some merit to the idea of going as simple as possible as quickly as possible. Just the same, a game with a dozen 50-point matches doesn't score very highly.

Overall, hitting the right balance between Score and Speed is tricky, and paying more than lip service to Function at the same time is difficult.

If I find time, I may add a write-up of strategies that just don't work, and tactics to avoid.

Google Image Labeler

There's a cute little game on Google called the Image Labeler. You're assigned a partner, and have 2 minutes to look at photos and type whatever comes to mind. If you match on a word, it saves it as a label used to mark that photo for future searches, gives you points based on the obscurity of the word, and moves to the next photo. It's a light game / puzzle that helps google find us photos more readily, and so, in theory, I'm happy to devote 10 minutes a day to a fairly enjoyable way to improve searches.

Problem is, everyone else who plays is a freakin' moron.

• They all type really slowly. 9 times out of 10, I'll have made 3x the entries my partner has by game end.
• They aren't very descriptive.
  
• They can't spell. And/or they can't imagine that they could ever mistype.
  
• And sometimes, they get really stupid. Here's some examples:
  

Example #1: There's a picture of waves crashing upon the rocky shore. I type rocks, shore, waves, crash, crest, surf, water, ocean, mist, beach, rocky. A minute and a half goes by, as I keep typing everything that appears in the picture, and every synonym I can think for them. In frustration I type "Ive entered 30 labels already". He never hits pass, he types only 4 labels. The game ends without a match on this, our second picture.
Partner's guesses: clouds, peak, pinnacle, point.
There are no clouds in the picture! They couldn't tell a shoreline from a mountaintop.

Example #2: There's a photo of a nazi rally, with hitler himself saluting the throngs of brownshirted swastika bearing thugs. I type nazi, nazis, hitler, brownshirts, soldiers, villains, army, germans, swastika, evil, rally, crowd, WW2, badguys, people.
Partner's guesses: soilders, march, guns, black and white, hill, people, man, men, boys, police, sun, lots of people
For the record, there was no sun visible, it was behind the "hill", which was really a building. The "police" were the freakin' gestapo.

Example #3: EDIT: NSFW example.

Example #4: The picture is a yellow arrow (with a zig-zag black stripe down the middle of it) emblazoned with words in purple saying "lowering your cholesterol". I type lowering your cholesterol, arrow, cholesterol, yellow, lowering, your, purple, black, zig zag, lowering your cholesterol.
Partner's guesses: lowering your cholesteral
And that's it, for over 30 seconds he sits there, no doubt wondering why I haven't typed the obvious phrase on the damn screen, and ignorant that he himself couldn't spell the word even when it was written there in front of him.

Example #5: The picture is Hadji. I'm all concerned with whether or not I'm spelling the names of the character's right, so I type in Haji, Hajji, Raji, Johny Quest, johnny quest, kid, tree, palm tree, turban, purple, india, cartoon
Partner's guesses: Terrorist.

I kid you not.