Hunt-the-pixel
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Hunt-the-pixel (also pixel hunt) is a term used to describe some computer game interfaces involving point and click with a mouse. The term is usually applied to adventure games in which the primary difficulty with some portion of the game lies in finding an object on the screen. In some cases, the required object is quite small, and may be only a few pixels in size. The player may not have the faintest idea what gizmo to look for, but often the game cannot progress without finding it. Players often apply the term to any game in which the gameplay is hindered by the frustrating task of determining precisely where on the screen to click.
One of the quintessential examples of pixel hunting comes from The X-Files: The Game, where a vital clue was a bullet exactly 2x2 pixels in size. Another example can be found in Dark Seed, where the player must locate a small bobby pin lying on the floor of a library, and yet a third in Beneath a Steel Sky, where the player must identify and use (without prompting) such tiny items as a 2x2 pixel lump of putty, a thumb-sized metal plate in a poorly-lit club, and a barely distinguishable light socket in an abandoned metro tunnel.
Missed objects will not always lead to an unwinnable situation, but sometimes will offer just better alternative approaches to future puzzles, being thus something like easter eggs.
Some games made by Sierra On-Line, including portions of the Space Quest and King's Quest series, have featured interfaces that at times required a hunt-the-pixel approach. One situation in LucasArts's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure required the player to locate a particular book among several screens full of bookstacks. However, LucasArts games have the advantage of a status line indicating the object the cursor is currently over. Another remedy was to make essential objects flash, or some other method to make the element more visible against the benign background.
