Gated community

Inside Dim Bulb Games’ gallery of lockpicking mechanics, and what it might mean for games

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?