Take a Leisurely Stroll Through a Virtual Museum of Video Game Lockpicking Mechanics

ign.com:

I haven't been to a proper museum in a long time — it's been solidly on the list of activities I felt were inadvisable during a global pandemic. But even when I visited museums on the regular, I'd never been to one quite like Johnnemann Nordhagen's Museum of Mechanics: an interactive museum built in a video game to showcase a specific type of game mechanic. In this case: lockpicking.

Nordhagen has a heck of a resume behind him: he's been a QA tester for Sony, worked on the PC port of BioShock 1, and served as a programmer on BioShock 2 and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified before leaving 2K to co-found Fullbright Studios in Portland, where he helped make Gone Home. He then returned to the Bay Area and founded Dim Bulb Games, where his team made Where the Water Tastes Like Wine.

But after Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Nordhagen's list of big projects hit a bit of a lull. He did some contract work for other indies, and put together some prototypes to pitch to publishers, but didn't get anything accepted. During this time, he saw the following tweet from journalist Nat Clayton:

A virtual museum of fishing mechanics

And Nordhagen replied:

OK this is a brilliant idea, but I want to see it for all common game mechanics. A museum of conversation mechanics. A museum of lockpicking. Hacking. Crafting. This would be incredibly useful for developers https://t.co/fRmsd0Bff4

At the time, one of Nordhagen's contract projects tasked him with building a conversation system, a process which involved a lot of research into other games' conversation systems to learn what made them good. Clayton's tweet began to stick in his head, and he eventually felt compelled to make an interactive museum as a side project. Of the options in Clayton's tweet,