#virtual museums

Video game developer Johnnemann Nordhagen, who has worked on Where The Water Tastes Like Wine, decided to commemorate the industry’s love of breaking into things through a digital museum that anyone can download and play. It’s called the Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, and it recreates lock-picking minigames from all sorts of famous franchises, from Fallout to Deus Ex. Each minigame is housed within an old-timey lock.

The idea, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, initially came from a tweet postulating that it would be cool to make a museum of fishing mechanics. Nordhagen saw the tweet and decided to craft his own museum of mechanics. Since he was in the middle of designing a new project, he was surveying how other video games have solved problems he is facing right now.

“It’s a lot of trouble to dig up old games and play them until you find the pieces you want,” Nordhagen said. While he could load up YouTube videos to see previous attempts by other games, it’s not the same as experiencing the minigames firsthand. So he built the mechanics from scratch and put them in a museum he could interact with, ultimately uploading it to the internet so other game developers can use it as a resource.

Ohhhh hell yes baby! Actually by asking this you’re getting me to do work I had planned for tomorrow as I need to share some of these resources on my works social media lol. So thank you because now I will have this ready to go for tomorrow. Some of these links will obviously be Canadian-centric because er... Canadian here, so that’s my focus haha. 

THIS is a great page that links a lot of the worlds digital collections. You’ll see ‘online exhibition’ when you click on any of those locations.

And the Virtual Museum of Canada has links to some really interesting online exhibitions. 

A google street view of the Royal Ontario Museum let’s you literally walk through the exhibition which is fun. Same with the Vancouver Art Gallery. 

A really phenomenal Canadian Indigenous artist is Alex Janvier. He painted a really incredible mural onto the roof of the Canadian Museum of civilization. It’s called Morning Star. What is cool about that link is that when you click the + sign at the corner of the screen, you get all sorts of addition links with videos, pictures, and information about the mural. Including the artist himself speaking. 

And I haven’t tried this but the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has an app that will apparently allow you access to their exhibitions. So that could be fun and would be bilingual for my Frenchies!