Kojima joked that his aged eyes did not lessen the pleasure of I Spy because the battle is fought with the mind, not with visual acuity. Against search engines that hand you stores, movies, or books effortlessly, he defended the joy and catharsis of searching on your own and training the discernment needed to find something valuable.
What set I Spy apart for Kojima was that searches started from word clues rather than from a pictured model: the player had to abandon a preconceived notion of how, for example, a frog should look, accept shadows, reflections and objects that are cut off at the page edge, and mentally shift the scale within a toy-like world. The books did not include answers; instead they replaced that certainty with extra challenges and prompts to invent one’s own riddles, to be played alone or with a child.
Kojima said he owns every book in the I Spy series and specifically recommended I Spy 7: Treasure Hunt and Can You See What I See? Treasure Ship. He noted that the dioramas in Treasure Ship took nine months to stage and highlighted a sequence in which each image opens the shot relative to the previous one; that filmlike technique was one reason he considered it his favorite.
Kojima bought the Christmas installment of I Spy for his son without really knowing what it was because, when he opened it, the pictures transformed his surroundings into a world of silver. Father and son became hooked, solving the riddles together almost every night, and Kojima kept buying one volume after another until, by the beginning of the next year, they had collected the entire series; he jokingly warned against shameless copycat books.
“I know that no one would ever wear a box in war, but I want to change the mood, relieve the stress and tension and control a little bit the feelings of the player by letting them calm down and relax for a second and then continue through the mission.”
“I'm getting older, and I'd prefer to do it while I'm still young!”