Video game physics suggestions?

[steuard]

I'm looking for ideas!

I'm giving a talk on "The Physics of Gaming" at a small convention this weekend (run by our college anime/gaming club). My plan is to first talk about "good physics" (games where some aspect(s) of physics are done well and important), then about "bad physics" (games where some aspect of physics is horribly inaccurate), and finally about how gamers wind up thinking like scientists (based largely on "Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds" by Steinkuehler and Duncan).

What I'd really like would be some neat, current examples of "good" and "bad", and ideally YouTube videos to illustrate them. I've got some ideas already, but any suggestions would be welcome. Thoughts, all you gamers out there?

Comments

[jon-leonard.livejournal.com]

The first ones which come to mind are Angry Birds for using a real-ish 2D physics engine, and World of Goo.

For bad physics you might pick any number of games that allow in-air jump control, or double-jumps.

[nemene.livejournal.com]

definately was thinking the entire super-mario series for in air jump control.

[beth_leonard]

*nod* although the slightly-bad physics in Super mario style games makes the games themselves much more playable. Contrast (for example) with the game "Braid" http://braid-game.com/ which also has bad physics (no momentum) but doesn't allow in-air direction reversal, and is nearly unplayable for the casual gamer. If you press "right arrow" the character goes right, and stops the instant you stop pressing to the right. Likewise you sink like a stone the moment you stop pressing to the right in the middle of a jump and can't reverse direction. It has even more bad physics than the mario series, but is much easier to code.

A free game I can think of with this property is Resonance from the Global Game Jam 2010. This type of physics is about the simplest there is to code, but is very annoying to play, much more so than Super Mario Bros. style games. Resonance does allow you to do in-air reversals, but otherwise is much like Braid in that you stop moving the moment you stop pushing on the key. This entire game was designed and coded in 48 hours or less.

--Beth

[beth_leonard]

P.S. (And so Jon gets the note that I've made a comment) Your Con looks like fun! Wish I could go.

--Beth

[kirin]

For some reason the first thing that comes to mind is how Bungie's Myth was one of the first times I'd seen passable real-world-ish physics in a real-time tactics game, but that's hardly current.

Not sure I've played a lot of recent games relying heavily on physics. Though I'm sure you can find a lot of YouTube of physics both good and bad in Skyrim videos - though most of the laughable examples are just the result of collision detection gone wrong. There is a great video somewhere of someone spawning several thousand cheese wheels and letting them cascade down a mountain-side, which actually looks reasonably good.

As for Super Mario, it probably has the most successful "bad" physics on the planet. It's completely un-natural, but *very* intentional, and most players internalize it quickly and learn to succeed by its own rules. I don't think I've ever had as much fun with a *platformer* genre game with near-realistic physics as with Mario.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Myth was one of the first examples that came to my mind (it was amazing!), but I asked around and not a single student had heard of it.

I think part of the issue lately is that many games do generally make an effort to get the physics at least close to right. Not so much in clearly-artificial games like Mario, but in anything that tries to be at all realistic. They still get things wrong (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not), but it's not as blatantly obvious as it once was.