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. 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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