Mechanic #7: Secrets

Secrets and Easter eggs can be found in just about every game, as long as you’re keeping an eye out for them.

They can be simple, such as a well-hidden sign in Grand Theft Auto 3 saying ‘You weren’t supposed to be able to get here you know’. That’s nice and easy, and a little bit of fun.

Or they can be more complex, such as this outrageous secret hidden in Battlefield 4:

Yup… That seems easy enough to figure out…

It requires you to decipher Morse Code in Belarusian, find a number of ridiculously well-hidden buttons (one of which requires flying a helicopter up a cliff and blowing up a tree), solve a logic puzzle involving lights, follow clues to a secret location, use audio manipulation software to reverse/speed up/alter the pitch of something you hear, understand a reference to a YouTube video, input a code, solve more Belarusian Morse Code, and then input a final code.

Wow. And after all that, all you earn is a new outfit (seriously). But this sort of secret engages entire game communities, who work together to try and solve it, generating buzz and discussion around the game itself.

For a better example of this let’s return to Banjo-Kazooie, one of the games we started off with and the owner of one of the most infamous secrets in video game history.

This secret is still being talked about to this day!

Your reward for collecting everything in the game is to be shown photos of secret areas and items you missed, and to be told that you’ll find out more about them in the next game. But hold on… We’ve collected everything already. We couldn’t possibly have missed anything!

Banjo-Kazooie was released in 1998 and the sequel, Banjo-Tooie would be released in 2000. This was back in the dark ages before Googling everything was commonplace, so countless players spent two long years trying everything they could to open up these secret areas, sharing their progress updates amongst their friends.

When Banjo-Tooie finally reached the homes of its avid fans, the promised revelation never came. This of course only added to the mystery, and so the game would continue to be played and discussed.

Many years later the truth was finally revealed, and it turned out to have all been related to hardware limitations. The developers wanted to transfer information between the two games, similar to what Mass Effect would do a decade later. Data from the second game would unlock the secret areas in the first game, and then you would be able to transfer the items you collect back to the second game to be used.

Unfortunately, this was before hard drives and memory cards were prevalent in video game consoles, so the proposed method of transferring data was to quickly swap the game cartridges. However, for newer models of the Nintendo 64 the window to do this would only about one second, and Nintendo themselves were concerned that people would damage their consoles, so they shut the project down.

Even so, this secret feature (known as Stop ’N’ Swop) has kept the game at the front of many players’ minds for nearly 20 years. The developers are still revealing new information about it to this day, proving just how much of a factor secrets can play in engaging people.

Secrets in online learning

Secrets are one of the best ways to inject a little bit of engagement into any training programme!

Secrets can be really powerful engagement tools

Creative learning and development professionals are able to make great use of the power of secrets. For instance, St Patrick’s day will often see LMS administrators hide shamrocks all over their platforms. Finding all of them might earn the learner a prize, sparking a buzz and setting the entire learner base on a manic hunt.

It’s easy enough to hide small Easter eggs throughout a platform as well. It could be a joke hidden in the site’s footer, something fun in the source code, or it could even be that something unexpected happens when you type out the Konami Code.

There’s plenty out there for an inquisitive learner to stumble upon!