The Brain-Game Drain

This is getting a little frustrating -- okay, fine, a lot frustrating.

I'm sitting here, playing 20 questions. Except it's not some other guy trying to guess what animal, vegetable, mineral I'm thinking of. It's my computer, logged onto 20Q.net. So far, the game has stumped me five times.

It got "theater" in 15 questions, "laptop" in 17, "peanut butter" in 18.

These days it's tough to keep count of all the free online games around to eat up your time, but sites like 20Q.net and smalltime.com -- the latter of which dares to belittle you when it figures out which TV sitcom personality you're thinking of -- are standouts. Sure, logging onto Pogo.com to play Word Whomp or Sci-Fi Slots or First Class Solitaire -- as an average 8 million people do in a month -- is like taking a coffee break in midafternoon. But somehow it seems you get more when the game is just as engaged as you are. It's not just coffee. It's a venti caramel macchiato with extra caramel.

"It's really fun. I admit I was amazed by its ability to figure out what I was thinking," says Kelly Modica. The game is simple, the usual back-and-forth questions with "yes" or "no" or "maybe" replies. She played 20Q.net recently after discovering that 20Q -- the hit $9.99 handheld she bought for her 8-year-old son for Christmas -- is based on the online game. She was thinking of a castle; the game guessed a house. "Close enough," she says.

The game's creator, Robin Burgener, crows, "The brain of 20Q gets smarter every time you play it."

Great. Now I'm contributing to how smart it gets. The more we play, the better able the computer is to win. How very Isaac Asimov.

Like Burgener, Gene Cutler created a computer game in which thinking about what you're thinking about is the main draw. It's not a new concept, the machine outsmarting the human, but nothing can motivate more than competition.

In Cutler's site, at smalltime.com, you think of a TV sitcom character or a dictator -- an odd combo, just as Cutler intended -- and the computer tries to figure it out. "Many people ask if something complicated is going on, but no, it's really, really simple," he says.

Simple or not, more than 32 million games have been played on the sites since 1996 -- 22 million on smalltime and 10 million on 20Q. Not whopping figures compared with free online sites such as Yahoo! Games and MSN's Zone, but not chump change either. "Out of that 10 million, 8.5 million were played from last year alone," says Burgener, who credits the increase to the popularity of the handheld version. Burgener says his site attracts about 40,000 individual players daily, Cutler about 12,000. (Multiply that by 10 when Howard Stern, Cutler adds, spent 10 minutes playing the game on his radio show in 2001.)