How do you break a lock? It seems like a question with a simple answer. Nevertheless, game makers have all found their own way in recent decades to bring player and slot closer together.
Game maker Johnnemann Nordhagen delved into gaming history and copied many of these techniques for his virtual museum full of minigames with locks that have to be opened, the ‘Museum of Mechanics: Lock Picking’. During his research, he encountered the “contempt” that the game industry has for its own history, as many old games are no longer playable, or simply forgotten.
You call it a museum of ‘lockpicking minigames’. What exactly does that mean?
“A mini-game is a separate activity within a larger game in which you step away from what you do in the rest of the game, such as shooting. A minigame always has a specific goal. While playing I found out that lock picking, breaking open locks, is often used by game makers. For example, to ensure that a player does not enter a new room without having reached a certain level. Or to offer a challenge as a bonus.”
But why are you building a museum just for this?
“I make a lot of storytelling games. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was working on one such project – trying to figure out a good way to implement conversations into the game. That is always a complex problem: you have questions like ‘how can the gamer participate in the conversation?’, but also ‘how do I give my writers the space to fill in their characters the way they want?’ I used in my previous game, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, tarot cards with universal themes on them that the player could give to a character. Which tarot card you give to a character determines what they tell you.
“I wondered: wouldn’t it be interesting to take stock of how other game makers before me had solved the ‘dialogue problem’? Locks seemed the easiest to start with. They are easy to implement and are not ‘stuck’ in all sorts of other systems.
What struck you the most?
“Especially how different they are. No minigame simulates the actual opening of a lock. That’s not what they’re for. You want a minigame like this to fulfill the fantasy of breaking a lock. Preferably with the skills you have acquired in the hours before. So is dust a game where you have to move fast, so you break a lock by reacting quickly. And in a puzzle game, a slot is a puzzle. ”
This almost looks like archeology. How is the game industry dealing with its history?
“The game is a medium that is still driven by newer, bigger, better. We thus cultivate more contempt for the past than respect. Yes, we now see games from twenty years ago as ‘old classics’, but a game from two years ago? Yesterday’s news. We forget that you only know that classic from twenty years ago because someone thought about it eighteen years ago.”