Picture of What was first developed by me, Michael Laszlo, as an entry in a contest sponsored by AOL. The contest was meant to inspire programmers to use AOL's Web AIM software in interesting ways, but the focus of this website, then as now, was a pictorial guessing game. I have since dropped the Web AIM commenting feature, which has been rendered obsolete by the decline of AOL's infrastructure. In the future I may add a Facebook widget with similar functionality.
The idea of making a game out of identifying mysterious pictures is hardly a novel one. I encountered it at a young age in children's educational magazines, where the pictures were mostly extreme close-ups of everyday items such as yarn or table salt. The point was that a familiar item can become alien when viewed from an unusual perspective. I was rather taken with this notion, and I initially wanted Picture of What to feature puzzles in the same vein. As I perused archives of liberally licensed pictures, I saw few close-up shots of the kind I had in mind, but many striking images of people, places, and things about which I knew nothing or too little. I decided to broaden the scope of my game to accommodate the material I had found, hoping that others would also wonder at these pictures and enjoy discovering some facts about them.
The ideal picture puzzle can be solved by close examination of the picture alone. Some of my puzzles are of this kind: there are details in the ancient Libyan mosaic, for instance, that should give away the subject to anyone with a general education. Others appeal to more specialized knowledge: to identify the young comic actor, one must have a clear recollection of the older comic actor as he appeared in his famous films.
Then there are the puzzles that cannot be solved by deduction from visual clues: one either knows what the hexagonal stone piles are called or one does not. I have chosen these pictures chiefly because they are visually arresting or because there is something surprising behind them, such as the fact that a major institution of any country can be so small and roughly hewn. In such cases, therefore, the puzzle is mostly an excuse to present the picture and to talk about it afterward. Yet even here I have attempted to construct the multiple-choice question in such a way that it can be answered with something better than random probability. For example, the name of the gnarled tree can be at least narrowed down by noticing that some of the answers are nonsensical. In the case of the shaggy animal's hindquarters, all three of the wrong answers are fictional compounds which I sought to make as whimsical as possible without falling into implausibility.
Constructing the multiple-choice questions has been the most enjoyable and the least time-consuming part of my work on these puzzles. I have spent far more time searching for pictures of suitably mysterious theme and with adequate image quality. Among the liberally licensed pictures I have seen, many satisfy one criterion or the other but not both. After selecting a picture—or a pair of pictures, one for the question and another for the answer—and writing the multiple-choice question, the greatest expenditure of time and effort is yet to come.
That is when I begin reading about the subject, partly out of personal curiosity and partly in a deliberate search for facts with which I hope to amuse or enlighten the readers of my explanatory notes. Occasionally I know enough about a subject to describe it from memory or to expound my feelings about it, but mostly my notes are a distillation of knowledge that I have freshly acquired through a few hours' reading on the web. In all cases I describe the subject in my own words, even if by doing so I risk introducing factual inaccuracies.
Those who seek a more authoritative and less personal description can always consult Wikipedia or a conventional encyclopedia. Encyclopedic account have their limitations too, so I have taken the time to look for online sources of information on each subject that seem to me reputable and helpful, yet sufficiently off the beaten track that they won't be the first thing a Google search turns up. Often the best material in the search rankings for a given query is to be found well beyond the first page of results. For those who are particularly interested in a subject, the links I mention under Further Reading are intended as a sample of sources to get them going. In almost every case, the most detailed and considered material will ultimately be found offline, between the pages of a book. Books were for a long time, and arguably still are, the preferred medium for scholars to express their best developed knowledge.
As of this writing, many of my older puzzles lack a Further Reading section. I intend to make up these deficiencies even as I add new puzzles to Picture of What. I must also confess that I return to my explanatory notes from time to time and rewrite them, sometimes comprehensively, to correct what I have come to perceive as flaws, or to add new material that I have discovered. For example, it wasn't until two years after making the puzzle of the grotesque face that I saw it featured on the cover of a classic fantasy novel.
I expect that the name "Picture of What" will seem awkward to many. To those who see it as grammatically suspect, let me answer that the phrase does occur in colloquial formulations like "You said this was a picture of what?", often with a modifier such as "now" or "exactly" appended to the "what." But I admit that it is still an irritating name. Let me defend its irksomeness on the grounds that it makes the name more likely to nag at the mind, and therefore more memorable, than a more conventional name.
"Picture of What" is also easy to say and easy to spell, which are rare qualities among the short phrases that remain for the taking among domain names. At the time that I was trying to think of names for my website, I settled on pictureofwhat.com somewhat reluctantly, without being sure that it was among the best I had come up with, but fairly confident that it was among the best. I think my judgment still holds up if I look at the names I was considering then, some of which I list below together with my reasons for rejecting them.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have delayed choosing a name until I had better ideas, but I reassure myself with the thought that it is not the name of a website, after all, that will determine whether it finds an appreciative audience.
All of the photographic images displayed on Picture of What are available from online sources of liberally licensed images such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and the Wikipedia Commons. The caption below each picture links to its source and to the license under which I am using it. You are free to reuse each picture according to the same license under which I am using that picture, and in many cases the source will list other licenses under which you may choose to use it. There are significant differences among the various licenses, so you should carefully read the terms of each one before using it.
I, Michael Laszlo, the developer of Picture of What, am the sole author of all text on this website and of all design elements apart from the pictures. I retain full copyright over the text and design elements I have authored, and do not license them for reuse or distribution outside my website.
Picture of What does not collect personal information from you and does not track your activity on any website except Picture of What itself. However, Picture of What sometimes publishes ads under the Google AdSense advertising program. Google uses the DoubleClick DART cookie to serve ads to you based on your visits to this website and other websites. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google advertising opt-out page.