The program featured a number of rooms and passageways, each of which was activated by a unique "trigger" known only to the architect and the homeowner. Interviews with the head inventor at Hidden Passageways revealed many portal options, including a revolving fireplace, a revolving bookshelf, and a staircase on hydraulics that lifts to reveal another staircase.
Though the passageways themselves may seem to have been torn from the pages of a Nancy Drew mystery (or perhaps a Mel Brooks comedy?), what is intriguing about them is the way by which they are accessed.
Rather than falling back on the old "trick book" trigger, many buyers opt for less obvious choices. For example, one homeowner's secret space is revealed only when one uses a special statuette to circumscribe exactly the right pattern over an electromagnetic countertop. Currently, engineers are working on a chess board that will, when all the pieces are in their correct places, give access to a secret room that originates elsewhere in the house. Hidden Passageways also offers hinged paintings that, when opened, reveal the passageway they depict; there are also wall panels that push to reveal hidden rooms, trap doors that mask underground safe rooms, and secret-rooms-within-secret-rooms, accessed by way of sliding shelving.Strangely enough, however, the rooms that are masked by these elaborate entryways are hardly ever worth the trouble. One might find oneself crawling through a slender gap in the back of a fireplace only to discover an ordinary sitting room on the other side. Or one might wander a corridor for half an hour before leaning against the wall in utter frustration -- and falling backwards into the secret loo. The luckiest of secret passage-seekers might find a cache of wine at the end of his expedition, but in more instances than not, one would be fortunate to find merely a dusty stairmaster or a pile of old posters. In fact, it is very consistently the case that the rooms concealed by these secret entrances are far less exciting than the entrances themselves.
If all of this starts to sound a little familiar, it might be because you've played a few videogames.
Admittedly, none of these secret features is a “convention” of architecture, but the opposite is true of videogames. Many (if not most) games, from Mario to Myst to San Andreas, invoke the convention of the secret room in order to add excitement, mystery, and heightened difficulty to the gaming experience. Just as, according to Hidden Passageways, a secret space in a house can make it “the talk of the town,” secret rooms and optional levels will spur additional interest in a game, and will get people thinking and talking about it in much more depth than they might otherwise. The mere fact of secret passages and optional modes keeps the astute player on the lookout for deeper significances. It acquaints them with the possibility of game interaction that they otherwise would not have known. It gives them the opportunity to “author” the game, to determine its path and its contents.
And even though secret rooms themselves are often routine in both form and content, offering a small clue or a one-up as a reward for perhaps hours of hard work, I maintain that, as in the example of the house, the room itself is not what a player is after -- rather, it is the experience of having found the room, of having interacted with text in a deep and meaningful way, that keeps gamers wanting to look beyond the obvious linearity of the gamescape and into the possibilities that lay beyond.
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