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

[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.