Format: Flash
Developer: Maximillian Hill
www.picktheperp.com

“Originally I had sounds in there, like game-show sounds. When you got something right you got a ding, and when you got it wrong there was a buzzer, but I cut them out in the end,” says Maximillian Hill, the designer of Pick the Perp. “Even without all that, I definitely see it as a game at heart, though.” And that, as it happens, is one of the few things about this difficult, fascinating game that you can be entirely sure of.

Pick the Perp is a browser-based quiz in which each round presents you with a single crime and five mug shots of potential perpetrators, before asking you to guess whodunit. Appealingly simple to play, even without the familiar framework of buzzers and dings, it’s also singularly hard to guess where the project itself came from. The muted government colours of the website suggest it could easily be the work of some cyber-age J. Edgar Hoover, while the heavy use of typewriter fonts conspires with the G-Man fingerprint stuck in the top left corner to hint that the whole thing is just a prank, a troubling pun exploring simplistic notions of guilt and innocence and the game-show democracy of the Big Brother years.

In fact, the site was designed over the space of a long weekend by Hill, who works at an advertising agency by day, and dabbles in web programming in his spare time. “It started when I found a site that had mug shots of people who had been arrested in the last twenty-four hours,” he explains. “I guess the idea for that was to dissuade people from breaking the law because now your picture’s on the internet and everyone knows you’re a bad person, or something like that. I got interested in the things you could do with the raw information and started tinkering.”

And while Pick the Perp is entirely unrelated to Hill’s day job, it shares a marketer’s interest in the person in front of the keyboard rather than the faces behind the screen. “There are a lot of people who think that the game promotes racism or stereotypes, and I don’t see it like that. I’d say that the site provides the user with an opportunity to make a snap judgement: if they choose to stereotype the five people they’re looking at, that’s actually quite interesting, and hopefully the site allows for some self-reflection.”

The average playing time for the 30,000 visitors Hill’s getting every day is six minutes, a testament to the murky appeal of the subject matter and a hint, perhaps, that the site is also something of a trick: the simple multiple-choice format promising that there’s an underlying skill involved in picking someone out. But, in fact, your only real hope of divining whether a person in a photograph was recently arrested for driving under the influence is if they still have a steering wheel wrapped around their head and a Pabst Blue Ribbon in their hand. “You can’t actually tell what anybody’s arrested for,” agrees Hill. “Having played it myself when testing it, it’s really hard to match up the people, and I have more info than anyone else: I know how many women or men are charged with aggravated stalking or whatever. Even knowing the likelihood of whether it’s a man or a woman doesn’t help me guess any better.”

Pick the Perp’s parade of tawdry unfortunates undeniably poses some tricky questions players will have to answer for themselves: these are, after all, unwilling NPCs, culled from sheriffs’ websites around the US – on top of which, they’ve merely been booked for a crime rather than convicted - and Hill freely admits he’s not sure he’d enjoy his own face appearing in such a context. And yet the game he’s created also cuts to the heart of a handful of issues that are worth spending at least six minutes of your day considering. Not only does Pick the Perp hold a mirror up to the player’s own willingness to judge, and the means by which they then form their judgements, it implicitly explores a powerful link between crime and entertainment from which many other games are happy merely to profit.

Play it long enough, and you might start to notice something else, too. As the roll call of charges endlessly repeats and the details of the photographs start to blur, mostly what you’ll see when you stare into the flash-stunned, drunken, bruised and confused faces in the mug shots is the embodiment of a notion that goes back to the earliest days of crime fiction: that you don’t have to look at a supposed villain too closely before you realise they’re almost inevitably some kind of victim, too.