Meead Saberi

Building Street Peekaboo sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. Hidden-object games are old and barely change. Peekaboo, Where's Wally, those seek-and-find books, and half of what we do online really, it's all the same move. Hide something, get someone to find it.

I think it sticks because our eyes never evolved to just look at things. They evolved to search, scan a scene fast, grab the thing that matters, ignore the rest. A hidden-object game is a tiny version of that, and finding the thing gives you a little hit.

The mechanic never really changes. What changes is where you're searching. Drawings, photos, game worlds, now 360-degree street view. Real streets are fun for this because nobody built them to be searched for a game. They're just whatever happened to be there. Signs, awnings, parked cars, some guy on a balcony. So they're genuinely hard, and you end up clocking a place while you're hunting for the bird.

Anyway, curious what people here think. Does a real cluttered street make a better hide than an animated scene someone designed on purpose? Or does the randomness just make it annoying/distracting? And maybe even the distraction is a fun part of the game.