The game
What is Find Otto?
Find Otto is a daily seek-and-find: one animal, hiding in a crowd, in a world painted fresh for the day.
Every day at midnight UTC, Find Otto paints a new picture-book world in ink and watercolour: a town square, a harbour, a park. Hundreds of animals fill it, each dressed up. Somewhere among them is Otto, a different animal every day, always in a long striped scarf and a hat and a top, carrying something. The day's clue names the animal and what it wears.
Nobody can find Otto by recognising one thing about him, because the crowd is built to defeat that. The decoys are not random animals: each shares part of the clue, the right species in the wrong scarf, the right scarf on the wrong animal, the right hat and the wrong top. You win by checking the whole clue against one animal at a time, and the clock rewards the player who does it fastest.
- added to your time for a wrong tap
- 10 s
- for the world to paint in before the clock starts
- 2.4 s
The name
Why is he called Otto?
Otto is a name that reads the same from either end, which suits someone you are looking for.
Otto is a palindrome: spelled backwards it is still Otto. It is also short enough to say in one breath and easy to type, and as a given name it comes from Germanic roots that mean wealth or fortune, which is a fair description of what a quick find is worth on the board.
Otto is a role more than a single character. Today's Otto might be a fox and tomorrow's a heron, but the scarf, the hat and the top stay, so the player learns what to look for and the day's clue adds only which animal it is.
A short history
Where the hidden-picture puzzle comes from
Looking for one thing in a busy picture is older than the printed picture book.
1800s
Puzzle pictures
Printers of children's books, periodicals and cards sell "puzzle pictures" in the nineteenth century: a landscape with a face, an animal or a person hidden in its trees and clouds, and the instruction to find it.
1946
Hidden Pictures
Highlights for Children, an American magazine for young readers, runs its Hidden Pictures puzzle from its earliest years: a scene with a set of small objects drawn into it, to be found and ticked off.
1968
The wimmelbook
The German illustrator Ali Mitgutsch publishes Rundherum in meiner Stadt, a wordless book of big, crowded street scenes. The form gets a name of its own, the wimmelbook, from the German for to teem, and a shelf in every German-language bookshop.
1986
Animalia
The Australian author and illustrator Graeme Base publishes Animalia, an alphabet picture book in which every page is packed with objects that start with its letter, and an animal hides in each, so the reader searches page after page.
2021
One puzzle a day
Wordle, published in October 2021, shows that a short puzzle everyone shares, once a day, with a result you can compare, is enough to build a habit. Daily puzzles of every kind follow.
Now
A painted world every day
Find Otto puts the two together: the crowded scene of the wimmelbook and the one shared puzzle a day, with a stopwatch and a board so a search can be compared.
Why it works
Why is one animal so hard to find?
Psychologists have studied this sort of search since the 1980s, and the same findings explain both the difficulty and the fun.
One odd colour pops out
In 1980 Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade showed that a single odd item, a red letter among green ones, is found at once however many others there are. Colour, orientation and size are picked up across the whole view in parallel, so the target seems to jump out.
A combination has to be checked
A target defined by two features together, a fox and a scarf and a hat, does not pop out. Treisman's feature-integration theory says attention has to be moved to one item at a time to bind its features, so the search is serial and every extra animal adds time.
So the decoys share parts
That is exactly how the crowd is built. If Otto were the only animal in a striped scarf, you would see him in a glance. Because every decoy matches some of the clue, no single feature gives him away, and only the full combination does.
Guidance makes it quicker
Jeremy Wolfe and colleagues found in 1989 that people are not blind searchers: the features of the target steer attention towards matching items. That is why the best strategy is to pick the most distinctive part of the clue and look only at animals that have it.
The method
How to find Otto faster
Four habits that turn a wander round the picture into a search.
01
Scan in strips
Choose a direction and sweep the world in bands, left to right and back, rather than jumping about. A strip you have finished is a strip you will not look at twice.
02
Check the species first
The animal is the cheapest feature to see from a distance. Ignore everyone who is not the right animal and slow down only when you reach one that is.
03
Then the scarf, then the hat
Among the right animals, test the scarf: long, striped and the right colours. Then the hat and the top. A decoy fails at one of these, so each test removes most of the candidates.
04
Tap only when it all matches
A wrong tap costs 10 seconds, about as long as it takes to check one more animal properly. When one fails, zoom in a step before you tap.
| Time from the start of the clock to the tap | 3:00 |
|---|---|
| 2 wrong taps at 10 seconds | + 0:20 |
| Time on the board | 3:20 |
In this game
How Find Otto keeps the search fair
Everyone searches the same picture, and the time is counted the same way for everyone.
The day's world, its crowd and Otto's hiding place are worked out from the date alone, so there is no luck of the draw: you and a player on the other side of the world search the same picture. There is one try a day, and a new world at midnight UTC.
The world paints itself in before the clock starts, for about 2.4 seconds, so nobody gains time by being first to see it. A wrong tap costs 10 seconds, and there are no hints: the search is yours alone. Once 50 searchers have finished, your time is read as the share of today's searchers you were faster than.
Vocabulary
Search terms, defined
The words for looking for one thing among many.
- Visual search
- Looking for a particular item among others, the task psychologists have studied for decades and the one every seek-and-find sets.
- Target
- The item being looked for. In Find Otto it is Otto.
- Distractor or decoy
- An item that is not the target but shares some of its features. The more features it shares, the slower the search.
- Pop-out
- A target so different in one feature that it is found at once, however many other items there are.
- Conjunction search
- A search for a target defined by two or more features together, such as a fox in a striped scarf. It is slower than a search for a single feature.
- Serial search
- Checking items one after another. The time it takes grows with the number of items.
- Wimmelbook
- A picture book of big, busy, mostly wordless scenes full of small stories, from the German for to teem or swarm.
- Search
- One day's attempt at Find Otto: from the clock starting to the tap that finds Otto.