Overlooked - The Hidden Potential of Hidden Object Games - Extra Credits

A few months ago, James was at a conference in Poland and a group of designers came up to him and asked him why he'd never done a show on hidden object games. At first, James thought they were joking because, you know, hidden object games. But then, after a moment, James realized they were absolutely right. Why hadn't we done a show on hidden object games? The answer was simple. They were one of the few types of games that James knew almost nothing about. He had never worked on a hidden object game. Worse still, he'd only played a few and that was a few years ago when the industry as a whole was just becoming enamored with the wonders of the casual market. Like most core players, James had simply sort of forgotten about the genre. But being asked about them made him think. After all, he buys the latest Madden game every year as a designer just to see what they've changed. So, why hasn't he kept up on this genre? I mean, hidden object games sell more than Madden and they certainly reach a larger audience. They had simply fallen off his radar. For some reason, this entire genre existed outside all the gaming and

industry media he'd read. So, as a designer burning with curiosity to understand why, he dove into it. The folks who initially kicked this all off by asking about the topic were from Artifex Mundi, one of the top studios in the hidden object genre. And they were kind enough to point James to a number of examples he should check out. And after diving through these games, James realized exactly why this large section of the industry almost never surfaced in all the games media he'd read. Hidden object games are designed for an entirely different audience. It was actually kind of amazing. All this time we in the mainstream game industry have been arguing about how to write female characters, how to design female characters, and here's a portion of the industry that's been quietly doing it for years. That's right, almost 100% of the protagonists in hidden object games are female. And a large number of the games James played were mother-daughter stories or played on maternal themes. But that's kind of mind-blowing. It recontextualizes the discussion we've been having about female characters in games for years. All this time, the real question we in the mainstream gaming world have been fighting over was not how do we create quality female characters, but rather how do we create reasonable female characters that still

appeal to our largely male audience. Because here are people who've been writing totally acceptable female characters for years and no one thought about it twice because they were made for a largely female audience and an audience with an average age over 20. This left James with a lot to think about and we'll probably do an episode on how those are fundamentally different questions once James has gotten a little more time to reflect. But it was just fascinating to him to see so many female characters in video games without once having a thought more negative or critical than this one's a little too Nancy Drew or this one is very Miss Marple. And that's not to say that all of them were well written. There's as much bad writing in hidden object games as there is in games in general, but other than some wafer-thin characters and the occasional poor translation, it was just fascinating to see games that didn't even seem to take notice of the fact that they were writing characters with no Y chromosome. But maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves. This may all be sounding a bit strange to some of you. I mean, you might be thinking what's all this talk about characters? Aren't hidden object games just about searching for images in a larger picture? And you know what? James was right there with you when he was first approached about it, but over the last

few years the evolution of hidden object games has been astounding. They basically took over where the old point-and-click adventure games left off. Essentially, imagine Monkey Island except some of the puzzles are find all the hidden objects in this room instead of figure out what do dad goes where to make some ridiculous thing happen. That's basically the state of modern hidden object games. Now, they often have a lot of the same problems that old point-and-click games had. They require a little too much guesswork and a lot too much retraversal, but if you miss those old point-and-click days and haven't looked at any of these games, it might be worth your time to do so. Who knows? Maybe we'll even do a games you might not have tried on hidden object games sometime. We wouldn't even have to dig that deep. I could probably just list the 10 best examples on the market and they'd all qualify. Often these games are easier and much more intuitive than the old LucasArts fare, but they reach into just about every thematic genre there is. James even found a Lovecraft themed at the Mountains of Madness hidden object game and surprisingly he said it wasn't the worst Lovecraft game he'd ever played. By the way, please don't get him started on a rant about the misuse of Lovecraft in games. We'll be stuck on it for a month. Just about the only thing James couldn't find represented outside of the modern

military genre was the cyberpunk genre. Side note, if you want some thoughts on how to make a cyberpunk hidden object game, James says to get in touch. So, overall, we'd like to thank the folks at Artifex Mundi again for revealing to us a genre which we had simply turned a blind eye to. It may not be our favorite genre. The play may not be what we want to do all the time, but we learned a great deal by exploring it. And being an entire branch industry which exists in its own ecosystem, quietly isolated from the roar of mainstream games, was a fascinating experiment. It made us fundamentally rethink how we're looking at the question of female characters in games and gave us some extraordinary insights into just what problem it is we're trying to tackle. We'll see you next week.