Technically: you move your mouse and point some hotspots, then you click to trigger some actions. Often there are some kind of action buttons or action verbs to choose from.

For instance, you point and click an icon to "open" and then you point and click a door in the graphics to "open door". That phrase may or may not be visible as a text when you do it.


More specifically: even though many genres would technically be point and click games, it has been for a long time reserved, as you noticed, for games in the adventure genre. So even though technically speaking playing a real-time strategy is pointing and clicking, those are not point and click games, as crazy as it may sound.

As others have already said, the term was introduced in the adventure genre when some games moved from the then de-facto standard parser input to graphical interfaces. You may see some other games described as point and clicks too occasionally, and even though it is technically correct, it generally feels wrong.

Some casual games with some puzzles and a story may be borderline cases when it comes to genre definition.

If you haven't played any point and click games before, try Broken Sword, The Secret of Monkey Island, or Syberia. Those are among the most highly regarded games in the genre.


You are mostly correct, but still slightly wrong.

Pointing and clicking came before mouses were commonplace, I don't think anyone called it pointing and clicking back then though. There were several games were you used joystick to click on graphical interface to play, just like was later the case with mouse-driven games.

One of the earliest point and click games (that is rarely called that) was The Detective Game for Commodore 64.

It was released in 1986 and it was way ahead of its time, famous Sierra and LucasArts games followed years later.

Even one look at the screenshots shows that it's actually a point and click interface though.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/detective/screenshots/gameShotId,358416/

I was going to say game simulator but this is better.

So you know King's Quest 1, where you type things and you pray the limited parser understands that you mean "get gold" instead of trying to grab the gold in the foreground?

Imagine if that was replaced with an arrow, and you used this thing called a "mouse" to "point" at things, and "click" on them to interact with them. No more having to guess the verb or commands, just click on Rumpelstiltskin and open a dialog tree with him.

Still my piont stands if someone was a even late 90's kid or early 2000's kid that had a pc that at the very least was a office or school level pc and had games for that level of a pc most would know what that type of game genre is that was asked about if not the name then the type of game atleast and with logical reasoning easily deduce the sort of game it is .. For me it was easy to deduce for while they wasn't really called that in the 90's and 2000's that much if at all it was easy to know
Fair enough as I suck at explaining such things still thanks for the better way to put it

I think the term became popular after Maniac Mansion released, but it was not the first "point-and-click" game.

In simplest terms: you use your mouse to point at things and then you click on them. But others told you that already.

The most famous style is 3rd person, static background. Often includes puzzles you need to solve (get correct items, combine them, use the result to achieve something that advances the plot).

Try them out. There are some free games here.

Classic, I recommend:
https://www.gog.com/game/beneath_a_steel_sky

Very typical 90's style point-and-click:
https://www.gog.com/game/flight_of_the_amazon_queen

A free game from the makers of Thimbleweed Park:
https://www.gog.com/game/delores_a_thimbleweed_park_miniadventure

Couple of demos - full game is sold on GOG:
https://www.gog.com/game/willy_morgan_demo
https://www.gog.com/game/kathy_rain_demo

You may have heard of the big ones. The Monkey Island series, Maniac Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, King's Quest, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Sam and Max, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango. Sierra and LucasArts did quite a few of those in the 80's and 90's.

Leisure Suit Larry series (1-5) is a good example of this evolution. LSL1 is a quite old parser game, LSL2-3 are a bit more polished in the parsing system, and in LSL5 they switched to point-and-click... and did LSL1 VGA remake with the same point-and-click technique.

Makes me wonder if it should be 'point and direct' or 'point and assist' instead. Afterall you usually are directing a character that's not you to the next thing to try and move the story along, and they may say 'no i can't fit my head into a coffee can' or some such nonsense, then you use a spoon and they go 'oh you mean get some coffee using a spoon, sure...'.

Usually the puzzles of games (especially older ones) have moon logic, or end up where you click everything you have on everything on screen until something works. Though some of the newer ones have hint systems (Back to the future) or scenes in the area will constantly repeat until you get the hint. Though some are very subtle and unless you remember every minute detail of stuff or check your inventory with a lot of scruteny the solution isn't obvious.

It's silly now but as being said it's historical term that at least made some sense when first appeared. Unlike say "RPG" which is silly and always was source of confusion and neverending arguing because playing role is part of almost all video games unlike in tabletop ones from where this term originates and where suites perfectly.

And it actually goes further back than that because Softporn Adventure told the same story but had no graphics at all, just parser-based text.


Yes, although there are some FPS games that don't use mouse input, a whole lot of them if we include console FPS games too. In some cases you don't even do any pointing in FPS games, assuming that the crosshair is fixed to the centre of the screen or something like that.

That's a bit academic I guess, because in most cases you really do point and click in FPS games, even more so if mouselook is enabled.

It's where a game actually has a point, and it clicks with the player, in such a way that it makes the game enjoyable...

Good call, I was thinking KQ6 in my head but didn't specify for some reason.

Video game genre definitions are still open to interpretation, which why there are still arguments as which game belongs to what. "Adventure" games in particular are quite nebulous. Zelda, Monkey Island, Tomb Raider, and are some games I seen cited as adventure games, even though they are all quite different from one another. "Point-and-click" narrows things further to games that use a cursor to navigate the environment or interact with objects or characters of interest.