Where's Waldo and the Gamification of Art

I realized only today that the children's book Where's Waldo, written and illustrated by Martin Handford, is actually a well designed game.

Assuming that everyone has flipped through a Where's Waldo book, I'm going to talk about something that most people probably don't know, Art Economy.  This is a principle in composition and design that dictates where you put the most detail, colors, and variety in your piece.

Taking the above piece, study where the most details and color are.  Typically, an artist will choose one to three focal points to emphasize.  In this example, it's the woman, the table, the window; while the background gets barely any attention at all, and is thus, very economical (economical is this sense is where you spend the least time).  Artists do this to let your eye rest on only a few objects at a time.  Now the genius of Where's Waldo comes from the opposite of this principle.

A typical scene in Where's Waldo contains so much happening at once, and this is done on purpose.  If the the goal of economy is to get your viewer's eye to rest on a few focal points, then the inverse is to get your viewer's eye moving all around the piece.  The game play of Where's Waldo is to, in essence, find Waldo, and the game's art mechanically enforces game play by having your eye move around the piece.  Where's Waldo literally uses its art as a mechanic.