Gated community
Inside Dim Bulb Games’ gallery of lockpicking mechanics
Locksport is the art, science and YouTube phenomenon of unlocking security devices that were meant only to be opened by keys. It’s a transgressive and geeky hobby, and so perhaps it’s no surprise that videogames have attempted to represent it for decades. Since August, Dim Bulb Games’ Johnnemann Nordhagen has been updating a playable museum of lockpicking, which you can visit for a price of your choosing on dimbulbgames.itch.io.
What was the impetus for the project? Natalie Clayton, one of the writers for Rock Paper Shotgun, just tweeted ‘a museum of virtual fishing mechanics’, or something like that. And I said, this should absolutely exist. It would be wonderful if there was one for conversation mechanics, and lockpicking, and hacking – that would be so useful for developers. I chose lockpicking because I thought there were relatively few games with it. It turns out there are way more than I assumed, but it’s been fun anyway.
So it’s intended to help the time-poor developer with their research?
That’s right. My thinking is that if you want lockpicking in your game, you download the museum and play all the different examples. If something is really exciting to you, maybe you download that game as well and see it in its natural habitat. Even a system as self-contained as lockpicking isn’t entirely separate from the context of the game in which it appears. A lot of games have lockpicks as resources, for example, so that brings in this whole economy that is not possible to portray in the museum.
Do you have strong feelings about game archiving?
That was one of the lenses that I thought this museum could work in – preserving mechanics rather than entire games, as most archivists do. What I realised, though, is that for archival you would want the mechanic to be as close to the original game as possible, with all the bugs. Ideally, you’d want to see the source code of that game imported. I’m more interested in doing a survey of the field of mechanics, because that’s the kind of tool I would like to see.
How did you approach curation?
Right now, the main breakdown of categories is between character skill and player skill. Character skill is not that interesting at the end of the day, because it’s all just math on the computer side. You either succeed or you don’t. But on the player skill side, I realised there were multiple kinds. Most of them are about being able to do something precisely or quickly with your fingers. But in the Sherlock Holmes series of games it’s more about trying to solve a puzzle with your brain. There’s one I’m working on implementing right now, probably the earliest example in the museum so far, which is from AD&D Hillsfar, back in 1989. It’s a matching game, basically – the tumblers have a particular shape, and you need to find the pick that has the corresponding shape.
It’s not a dexterity thing, but a timed visual puzzle. I think that’s fascinating, because if you’re a developer, the first lockpicking games you might think of would be Skyrim, Fallout, Oblivion and maybe Thief. If you start to see other examples, you might think, ‘What other ways can I challenge the player?’
Have you ever picked a lock in reality?
I have, actually, yeah. I’m not very good at it, very simple stuff. But I had a friend who worked with me at 2K Marin, and she was really into it and had a set of lockpicks on her at all times. I got to mess around with her practice locks.
Where does the satisfaction of picking locks come from?
It seems like for the people who pick locks, it’s mostly about the puzzle. Solving a challenging lock while timing yourself is like a Rubik’s Cube. I think there are also people out there who view it as a practical skill—if you locked yourself out of your house, my friend at 2K could get you in – and also an expression of freedom and control. There’s a lot of overlap between hacker groups and lockpicker groups. I think those ethoses go hand in hand.
I don’t think that videogames do a good job of capturing any of that, and I’m not sure that they’re trying to either. In the games that I’ve seen, lockpicking is generally there as a gating mechanic or part of the resource engine.
“For archival you want the mechanic to be as close to the original game as possible, with all the bugs”
Do you ever worry about potential copyright infringement?
I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding is that game mechanics cannot be copyrighted. I would hope that people making other games are free to borrow from those ideas. I’ve taken no source code, no art assets. No one’s sent me a nasty letter yet.