“Hidden object games were one of the first genres that were really meant for an assumed feminine audience,” Chess told Polygon. Chess saw how certain hidden object games ”both reinforce and complicate the expectations of women gamers,” but continued in the genre’s legacy of “push against some traditional conventions, illustrating how digital spaces have begun to rewrite traditional narrative conventions.” Searching the past
Author and University of Georgia professor Shira Chess, who wrote the feminist video game theory book Ready Player 2, recognized the complexity of these hidden object games in a 2014 paper called Uncanny Gaming: The Ravenhearst video games and gothic appropriation. Games like Hidden Folks, Wind Peaks, and even Toem are reimagining the genre as something different. Some indie games have appeared over the past few years with a re-branding of the genre a few studios refuse to call their games hidden object games, worried about association with the others, instead focusing on the act of searching. Hidden object games, some of which center on romance and gothic storytelling, have faced the same fate of those very books, deemed inconsequential or unworthy of analysis and enjoyment. A so-called casual genre, hidden object games are played enthusiastically and widely, but largely dismissed as fluff - the same way romance novels are perceived. The core mechanic of hidden object games spans well beyond the video game industry, despite the genre itself remaining in the industry’s margins. I-Spy Spooky Mansion Image: Scholastic Corportion Typically, the object will wiggle a bit - or trigger some other simple animation - before the player moves on. It’s about as simple as these games come, with a narrator reading out what they’ve “spied” once the player clicks on an item.
Hidden objects games series#
I-Spy, for its part, has a series of hidden object video games that go back to 1999, published by Scholastic, like I-Spy Spooky Mansion. Think Highlights magazine or I-Spy books, which were later adapted into virtual iterations that worked largely the same way, just with digital motion. Illustrators began adapting puzzles into books, magazines, and newspapers. The earliest hidden object games were, of course, ones that could be played without any equipment. Going even further, people have been playing hidden object games for hundreds of years - seeking out hidden objects in illustrations or simply spotting objects in the world, à la I-Spy. The inherent mechanic is in reacting to things hidden in an environment, whether that’s a patterned ledge, as an environmental clue, or an object literally hidden within a space.
You could argue that there are elements of hidden object games in most video games. What buttons do I press? Which way do I go? What items can I grab? Hidden object games focus singularly on this one idea - the gameplay of searching - to create compelling environments, to tell stories, and to build out worlds. When you start playing a video game, it’s one of the first things you do: notice things. The act of noticing something, with your eyes or hands or nose, comes naturally to humans.
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