The Good Tech Companies - DOOM CAPTCHA: Are Video Games the Future of CAPTCHA?

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/doom-captcha-are-video-games-the-future-of-captcha. Let's take a look at DOOM CAPTCHA, a trending technology in the world of human/bot distinction! Check more stories related to tech-stories at: https://hackernoon.com/c/tech-stories. You can also check exclusive content about #captcha, #trends, #video-games, #bots, #ai, #doom-captcha, #doom-catcha-implementation, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @brightdata. Learn more about this writer by checking @brightdata's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. DOOM CAPTCHA is a novel, fun project that asks users to play a short round of DOOM in their browser to prove they are human, replacing traditional CAPTCHA challenges. Developed using Emscripten to port the game into WebAssembly, it offers a unique twist to online verification.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Doom Captcha. Are video games the future of Captcha? By Bright Data? Over the last few days, the IT community has been buzzing about Doom Captcha, a CAPTCHA that lets you play Doom in your browser to prove your human-robot crossmark. Tons of post-shave flooded social networks, especially LinkedIn and Reddit. The project's GitHub repository quickly shot past 300 stars in a few hours. Star Rocket but is this just a fun side project, or is there more to it? Could doomed Captcha Abe the next big thing for online verification?

Will we soon need to beat video games to prove we're not bots? Video game read-on to find out what's behind the hype and whether the future of captcha involves fragging enemies instead of clicking on traffic lights. Traffic lights what's Doom Captcha? As the name suggests, Doom Captcha is exactly what it sounds like, a captcha that asks you to play Doom to prove you're human. Joystick the idea is simple, you're presented with a fully playable Doom instance running in your browser globe, and your task might be something like, kill at least three monsters. Successfully complete the mission, and you've proven your humanity man standing. Fail, and, well, better luck next time

cold sweat smile. You can test it yourself on the official demo site. Warning warning. Doom is famously addictive fire, so be ready to lose track of time taking down enemy's trophy alien monster. Doom is built on the shareware version released for non-commercial use. It's a registered trademark of id Software LLC, a Zenimix media company. Implementation details for nerds Doom Captcha works its magic by harnessing Emscripten to compile a lean and mean port of Doom into WebAssembly by Lorti, creating a bridge between the C-based game run loop and a JavaScript-powered CAPTCHA UI. Brain pretty amazing, right? The original idea behind Doom CAPTCHA first spawned from GitHub user Vaviron Romoto, who kicked things off back in 2021. It all began with a minimal,

SDL-based port of Doom, fine-tuned to run smoothly in your browser. But transforming it into a Captcha-worthy adventure? That required some next-level customization wrench. Fast forward to just a few days ago, and Guillermo Roche dropped a fresh, optimized, and modernized take on Doom Captcha, bringing the concept back to life with more Polish and Wicked enhancements. Extensions made for the CAPTCHA achievement. Modified the build to work with the shareware version of, keeping things legit. Backslash dot, introduced new process flags for smoother gameplay flow. In, skips the menu screen and launches you straight into action. In, automatically respawns players after a quick 2-second delay backslash dot dot added custom

javascript event-based callbacks fires when players are born or respond triggers when a player bites the dust celebrates eliminating foes backslash dot dot for extra chaos added default flags in to crank up the challenge smile with horns. Equals nightmare mode. Equals even faster enemies. Equals jump straight into the thick of it. Equals no menu escape hatch. Ready to dive deeper? See the V0 UI generation or grab the source, captchas don't have to be boring. That's the motto behind the original Doom captcha project from Vivir and Remoto, released in 2021. Since then, captchas have gotten way more complicated, and let's be honest, more boring as AI makes automating them a breeze. Most sites now feel more like government bureaucracy than fresh digital experiences.

Continuously proving you're human is tedious, frustrating, and downright stressful weary. So, why not shake off that stress with a quick round of D.O.O.M.? That's what Doom Captcha is all about. Instead of dragging puzzle pieces, clicking hydrants, or answering, where are E.T. traffic lights, yet again, Doom Captcha gives you a far more satisfying challenge. Control Doomguy, frag some monsters, and prove your humanity with style collision. Needless to say, the original project became a smash hit, see what id id there, earning a thumbs up from none other than John Carmack, co-creator of D.O.O.M. It even landed at number 3 on Product Hunt's WTF Product of the Year award.

Guillermo Rocha's modern, polished version took things even further, racking up GitHub stars like a madman. Is Doom Captcha the future of fighting bots? TLDR. Well, not really, at least not in this iteration. Let's find out. A project for educational PURPOSESAs stated in both the original and the new versions of the project. Don't take DOOM Captcha too seriously. That's just a fun little project. If you know how to code, it's pretty easy to break the security of this thing. The project is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only, so you shouldn't use it as a real anti-bot measure on your

production sites. Want to dive deeper into the latest challenges posed by advanced anti-bot technologies? Watch the video below. http://www.youtube.com Watch, V equals R arcs D 5 4 and embeddable equals true DEP reinforcement learning as a N issue The relationship between AI and video games goes way back. One of the first AI projects that really made waves involved training a model to play Super Mario World using only raw pixels as input. This was made possible by DeepQ learning and a spatial transformer network. Lightbulb If a project from 2016 could learn to play and solve the first level of Super Mario World, it's hard to believe that today's advanced AI models can't easily handle something as simple as kill at least four monsters in Doom. Robot eye-based aimbots.

A real problema imbot, ever heard of it? If you've played an online FPS game on PC or with crossplay and seen someone destroy the competition with god-like accuracy, that's aimbot at work. No surprise, one of the biggest applications of AI today is game C heating, improving performance through bots that automatically target and kill enemies. And guess what? Many of these bots are open source on GitHub, with dozens of collaborators and thousands of stars. So yeah, while killing monsters in Doom is fun, it's definitely not bot safe. Cold sweat smile how to solve any captcha. Sure, this Doom captcha implementation might not be the

future of anti-bots, but here's no doubt that, prove you're human, tests are going to need to get smarter. Yet, they'll also need to be more engaging and interesting if they're going to survive. But here's the catch, new, modern captchas could become a real problem, especially if you're building browser automation tools like a web scraping bot. Luckily, we've got you covered. You can learn more about captcha bypass in these guides. How to bypass captchas with Playwright. How to bypass captchas with Puppeteer. How to bypass captchas with Selenium. How to bypass captchas with Cypress. How to bypass captchas with Python. If those tutorials don't do the trick, Bright Data has you covered with a CAPTCHA solver Python. If those tutorials don't do the trick, Bright Data has you covered with a

CAPTCHA solver service that integrates with any programming language and let you bypass challenges from the most popular providers, Final Thoughts. Doom, the game most of us all grew up with, or at least played once, meets CAPTCHAs, the universally hated barrier we face as human users. Combine those two, and you get Doom Captcha, a wild project that could totally change the way we think about proving we're not bots. No matter how captchas evolve over the years, there's always a clever way to be past them, and bright data has got and will always have your back. Join us in our mission to democratize the web, keeping it accessible to everyone, everywhere, even for automated scripts.

Until next time, keep exploring the web freely and without captchas. Globe thank you for listening to this HackerNoon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit HackerNoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.