I deeply love playing board games with family and friends, but it is not my most common setting for game play, largely due to difficulties involved in getting multiple schedules aligned for such interactions. For frequency, my most common outlet is a hidden objects game app on my mobile phone. The game is called Seeker’s Notes and can easily monopolize a couple of hours if I am not careful. 

As the game begins, players have a relatively small group of locales to explore, including the train station, café, and mayor’s office. As a player continues, they unlock new locations and receive new missions for those settings. Initial goals in a new location are in the neighborhood of 10 hidden items, and as a player gains skill with repeated searches, goals increase in terms of how many items are sought to complete the location. By later levels, players find 20-30 items per search, within a three-minute time frame. Scenes are densely packed with lots of detail and an assortment of items to seek. Each item tends to have about five or so common places it is found, but somehow the searches can still remain challenging due to the sheer number of possible combinations of items and places. 

In addition to the hidden object challenges, there are also a few other types of puzzles including card-matching (memory style,) jumbled picture reassembly, and tile-switching. As a location or puzzle attempt is finished, players earn various components that can then be combined to create talismans to ease game play, trade items to swap for energy, collections that complete missions, and other reward items. Game progress occurs in multiple directions. A player’s overall level in the game increases as they gain experience points with successful explorations and mission accomplishments. Within each location, levels also increase with successful completions. As levels increase, players find more objects or otherwise demonstrate advancing skills to continue to make progress in the game. There are daily goals as well, including things like searching a particular location or search mode a set number of times, or finding a given number of specific game items. The game also typically has about a one-month cycle of “special events,” where the newest location is energetically cheap to explore, and there are new challenges every week or so, valid for just the given time span. 

A player chooses the location they want to explore from the stylized map, and each location cycles through a variety of styles of search, including finding items based on a text description, jumbled words, or a silhouette image of the item, looking in only a small section at a time, while the rest of the scene is obscured by “night,” finding matching pairs, or finding objects that are “morphing” between shapes. You can earn or purchase tools to make searches more successful by pointing out a missing item or adding time to your clock. 
On occasion, locations are occupied by an “anomaly,” such as increased speed of time passage, dark clouds floating across the scene, or only getting one item to search for at a time, rather than the usual four. Anomalies burn significantly more energy to explore a location, but result in more experience points when successfully completed. When a player runs out of energy, they cannot explore again until their energy replenishes sufficiently for a given location, either through waiting while it gains a point every three minutes, or using food items found or gained as rewards in various challenges. 

Of course, there are also plenty of options to use real-world money to purchase talismans, food, energy, and other attributes in the game. Ads pop up routinely between searches, and they would undeniably speed success, but I am able to play the game effectively without any purchases. If that were not the case, I would have likely given up the game long ago. 

While I typically play the game solo, I have occasionally shared a session with my husband or children. The biggest drawback to doing so is the small screen on a phone. It is hard to look at it jointly for any extended period without knocking heads together. Several years ago, my husband had downloaded several hidden object games onto an older computer, and we enjoyed playing them together and searching for items as a team, so I have participated in the genre as a joint project. My husband grew up playing video games and has quite a bit of expertise with controllers and complicated game mechanics, so in most games we play together, he takes the role of coach, as was demonstrated to be a common gender pattern by Siyahhan and Gee (2016). In hidden object games, we are on much more even footing, as the basic mechanic is merely to click on or touch the hidden items and a good eye or recognizing vocabulary can be equally beneficial. In most video games, we play with him in the role of expert and me as an apprentice, but in hidden object games, it is much more collaborative as we exchange knowledge and trade roles of recognizing an unusual item or term. (Stevens, 2008) 

At that time, we noticed that most of the games had lovely artwork and occasionally surprising terminology for search items, a trend that continues with Seeker’s Notes. This can make for some interesting vocabulary lessons such as in the setting “Candy World,” where one of the search items is “champignons.” I knew just enough French to recognize that I was looking for mushrooms, but did not realize until I looked it up that apparently the word can also be used in English to specifically describe button mushrooms. A “horse” can be a life-like figurine or statuette, or sometimes, a rocking horse or hobbyhorse (stick with a mock horse head on it.) A model ship in a bottle is sometimes called a “ship” and sometimes a “bottle.” This ambiguity gives some practice with more flexible thinking as a player learns to be open to multiple interpretations of a given term while searching. A quick look at company info shows the creator company, MYTONA, is based in Russia, which lines up with what I remember finding when we used to download them and were curious about interesting verbiage in their productions. I do not know if it is a common Russian industry, or if we just happen to be drawn to a particular style dominated by Russian artists. 

As I initially started thinking about this game, I had no ideas for educational purposes for it, as I don’t consider it a particularly instructive game on the surface. However, as I thought further about it, I realized it could actually be a good demonstration in a psychology or marketing class exploring motivation and “stickiness” of games or activities. (Liu, 2016) A new goal every day and repetitive, easily mastered basic aspects of the game encourage a player to connect with it on a daily basis. The month-long goals are extremely challenging (but probably not quite impossible) to achieve without using some of the paid features, which could also be considered cheats as in the Stevens (2008) article.

As I thought further, I also realized that while I wouldn’t use this precise game for it, the overall style of hidden pictures or seek-and-find could be (and probably has been) used for various training or educational purposes that involve recognizing a particular pattern. I could see creating a pre-lab exercise early in the school year asking students to identify and describe a solution for unsafe situations in a picture of a sample laboratory. In an occupational safety training, a similar model could be beneficial for training workers to recognize potential hazards on a worksite. For a history or language arts class, perhaps a picture including anachronisms or items that do not belong in a given story or setting and asking students to find and explain why they do not fit. 

Having recently worked with some chemistry students on molecular geometry and remembering how I struggled with it in organic chemistry, I feel like an electronic game version could provide a great opportunity for students to be exposed to many molecules and practice recognizing properly shaped vs. unlikely configurations in a more gameful, less pressure-filled setting than the usual difficulties of first mastering the prescribed 3-dimensional drawing method,then attempting to decide how things will orient themselves, which can be long, tedious, and difficult for novices to master. In learning to first recognize them in models, ideally rotatable, in an online format, there would be a lower barrier to entry, increasing the likelihood of being willing to try. Secondly, when looking through many takes a matter of minutes rather than a single model taking minutes just to draw, students may be more willing to spend more time engaged with the task. In addition, as they practice, they are likely to find themselves recognizing patterns they may not even initially be able to describe but will give them enhanced success and a feeling of progression. (Bell, 2018) As they become more comfortable with available configurations and how molecules arrange themselves, translating that knowledge back into a particular method of drawing and making predictions may become significantly more manageable. 

References:

Bell, K. (2018). Game on!: Gamification, gameful design, and the rise of the gamer educator. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press.

Liu, H. (2016, October 6) “Do this one thing to make your product sticky” Retrieved from: https://medium.com/startup-grind/do-this-one-thing-to-make-your-product-sticky-aa8ed6d55797

Siyahhan, S. and Gee, E. “Understanding gaming and gender within the everyday lives of Mexican-American family homes” in Kafai, Y. B., et al (Eds.) Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional perspectives and inclusive designs in gaming. (pp. 92-104) Retrieved from: https://via.hypothes.is/http://remikalir.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/SiyahhanGee2016.pdf#annotations:r_kS6Fv1EeqMJZ-Cn3IXnQ 

Stevens, R., T. Satwicz, and L. McCarthy (2008). “In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives.” in Salen, K. (Ed.)The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. (pp. 41–66.) doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.041