in this game then i found this

http://i.imgur.com/UiI14HT.gif

and it suddenly became clear

is any one else feel the same way now (or before if they saw this before?)

I have picked locks in real life so the lockpicking mini-game has always made sense to me (unlike the Speechcraft mini-game). The type of lock portrayed in Oblivion is called a pin tumbler lock. It's a fairly common type of lock.

I don't have a lot of real-life lockpicking experience, but I understand the mechanical principles of those types of locks, so the mini-game made sense to me.

The Speechcraft mini-game, OTOH, required me to hit YouTube before I could figure out what the heck I was doing.

Well, they tried to match lockpicking to something similar to that, but it's really just about timing. Cool animation though.