This week’s Homer in Silicon column is on hidden object games; specifically, how a narrative game mechanic can be about the player/reader relationship instead of the player/protagonist relationship.
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Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
What exactly is a “hidden object game”?
There’s a big picture on the screen. It is crowded with stuff. There is a list of objects to find in the picture. You click on the objects to cross them off the list.
If you click too much on empty space, you are penalized in some way.
Objects are often sorta disguised as other objects. Objects are occasionally listed misleadingly on the list. I’ve played games where “horse” meant you were supposed to click on a seahorse sculpture, and “mouse” meant the mouse-shaped watermark on the ceiling. And I’ve played several where the whole scene is so badly photoshopped that you can barely tell what anything is supposed to be anyway, let alone identify your special objects.
If you can’t find all your objects (and you never can, usually for reasons that aren’t really your own fault) then sometimes you can use hints. Sometimes the hints are limited in number; sometimes to get new hints you have to play some other, equally-annoying minigame.
I am not really a fan of hidden object games.
The article is also a gripe, but in a slightly different direction.
This also seems to have provoked a spin-off thread on kotaku more generally about whether games can successfully adapt literature. I’m not convinced by all the arguments, but I do like this bit:
Since many great novels might not translate well as an entire piece, it might be interesting to see a Wario Ware style microgame collection:
help Holden Caufield lie to strangers,
help Mrs. Dalloway pick out flowers,
help Socrates trap opponents with logic,
help Oedipus gouge his eyes out,
help Hamlet kill Laertes.
And so on.
Sounds like the Worst Genre Ever. In graphic adventures, we call that pixel hunting and loathe it in the same way that guess the verb is loathed in IF.