Rules
The user was randomly paired with a partner who was online and using the feature. Users could be registered players who accumulated a total score over all games played, or guests who just played for one game at a time. Note that players came from around the world, some practicing their English, and both American and British English would be encountered (soccer vs. football). When an uneven number of players were online, a player would play against a prerecorded set of words.
The current rules follow. For changes in the rules, see the history section. Over a 2 minute period, the user and his/her partner were shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image they saw. When the user's label matched the partner's label, both would earn points and move on to the next image until time runs out. It was possible to pass on an image but both users would have to agree to do this. The score was variable from 50 to 150 depending on the specificity of the answer. The 150 score was rare, but 140 points were awarded for a name or specific word, even if the word was spelled out in the image. Terms with low specificity like "trees" or "man" earned only 50 points. There was never any screening for correctness, so that if both players typed "Jupiter" for an image of Saturn, they would presumably both get 140 points.
Labels that had been agreed on by previous users would show on an "off limits" list and could not be used in that round. Some players thought that the game staggered appearance of the images, and that sometimes it took the first words typed by one player to form an "off limits" list for the other player. In other words, the off limits words might be unilateral, asymmetrical. This would explain the rather frequent circumstance when it seemed a partner couldn't think of words like "car," "bird," or "girl." Very rarely, at the end of the match it would become obvious that one image was different for the two players. Perhaps this was simply an error, or perhaps it was a test to see how quickly people would pass when their descriptions did not match, but it may also have been a mechanism implemented to view cheaters, if the words for the different images were similar. At times, one user's computer would fail to load a new image, or continue to display the previous image shown. Times likes these also called for a mutual "pass" on the part of both players.
Read more about this topic: Google Image Labeler
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