The Laws of Physics in an Animation Universe.

                           Imagine you are tasked with creating an entire world.  How would you even begin?  Well, those of some ‘sharp wit’ might simply say ‘the beginning’; what’s there, what’s real.  There are many ideas we hold that bind our notions of ‘solid reality’ together which we often forget to notice.  Over time as we grow, what we see everywhere, every day, simply becomes the way ‘it is’, and we hardly question the reasons behind why it is.  Incidentally, physics and the dynamics of how things move through the space we inhabit are some of those things – and very important ones at that.  They are certainly components that, while not necessarily considered first and foremost, once they’ve become realized factors, would be pivotal necessities in creating a world of your own devising.  How else would anyone move themselves, move anything, what would happen if those moved things collided?  What is possible in such a world and what would break its natural laws?  As you ponder your own world creation, these questions are also exactly the sort of thoughts that creators in gaming must grapple with, as they create worlds of their own for either one, or many people to experience.   Suffice to say that looking at such a game might, not only prove how much physics plays a role in these worlds, but just how very different a world can be from what we take as ‘real’ when physical rules are stretched. 

                A particular game we can analyze would be one by the name of Guild Wars 2, a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) which is played on a PC, and created by the company Arenanet.  The world itself, named Tyria, is certainly not the same as the Earth we know; and beyond all the strange races of beings, flora, and magic one might encounter, the physics are quite notably stretched beyond comparison to our known reality.  

                One example of such reality-stretching is found in the dynamics of jumping within the game itself.  Consider a moment, just how much you jump places in your own life.  Unless you are quite into parkour or prolific at dunking in basketball, it might seem like almost a laughable thought.  However, in Tyria, this is certainly not the case; for in many scenarios, incredibly long leaps across cliffs, platforms, or terrain is an absolute must, it seems, breaking laws of Earth-known physics in the process.  Some structures are even built with these gravity defying leaps in mind; imagine having to jump up every stair to get to work instead of walking when the stairs are hovering in the air, approximately 3 feet apart, and 4 feet elevated above the previous one.  It’s ridiculous when compared to what we know!  But it doesn’t stop there. 

                The game introduces something called ‘Jumping Puzzles’, in which it takes complete knowledge of the absolutely ridiculous physics of the game (atop player’s wishes to climb and jump up every strange thing they can find due to that desire) and makes the ordeal into a challenge, stretching perception even further.  These Jumping Puzzles literally have characters climbing up odd buildings, mountains, trees, volcanoes, and jumping between floating boulders, geyser lifted stones, vanishing force fields, tree branches, tiny ledges they can barely fit on, and just about anything else to reach a particular destination for a prize.  You don’t know how to do it or how to get there, you simply try to push the physics of the game until you succeed.  And despite it being possible, it’s quite easy to miss the mark.

                Which then brings us to falling dynamics.  Or more eloquently put, the effects of gravity on the world or other characters.  Even though everything still seems fairly rooted to the ground, forces themselves, (especially those considered when falling) seem to have been skewed.  Characters will take ‘falling damage’ in distinguished percentages; no matter your stature, armor, or anything else, the damage you take from a fall is calculated by how high up you’ve fallen from, and the same for all across the board, - the only way you take no damage at all is if you fall into water.  However, damage to your person is simply knocked off from your ‘health’, and recoverable in mere seconds (as long as it doesn’t kill you), which certainly isn’t comparable to the broken bones and who knows what else you might be left with should you jump off a castle roof in Earth’s reality.  By these things one might think that, perhaps the gravity in Tyria is much less of a force than it is on Earth, though there are other inconsistencies that conflict with this thought.

                Beyond mere jumping and falling, should gravity be lessened, how much force it takes to move certain objects should also be affected.  Though actually being able to interact with and apply force to objects in the game is very hit or miss.  On the one hand, certain heavy things like boulders and various other items can be picked up and thrown great distances, which would follow along with the ‘lessened gravity’ thought.  And yet, pulling out a chair (or even moving one at all) seems to be impossible.  Objects you think would be able to be pushed cannot be moved in the least, and in many cases they can only be destroyed.  But from there, it only gets stranger, as certain forces in Tyria seem to be able to accomplish feats they never could on Earth.  Such as felling stone-keep walls in minutes by, quite literally, hitting them enough times with a sword.  Or that one is capable of exploding entire homes by sending trained animals to bite at the foundations. 

                There have been some attempts to preserve physics as we know it, though they all fall a bit short.  At the very least some sense of gravity is in place, even if it is hard to believe in some cases.  Some objects seem to be affected by inertia and exhibit ‘follow through’ and ‘drag’ like moving hair, or clothing, however it is selective and not as universal as a natural law might have you think it should be.   And though there are attempts to create water resistance and allow for swimming complete with deep sea struggles, the moving speed of someone swimming verses running is actually faster in water than on land.  In Tyria, you’d make it somewhere quicker swimming upstream than you would dashing on foot.

                Though despite all that, it was all part of what the creators of the world seemed to intend.  At least by way of the Jumping Puzzles, the developers knew the limits of the physics in the world, and utilized them, to make the world they were creating interesting.  It is in challenging the dynamics they’ve created and the rules they’ve made that characters in the world can get a prize.  And knowing those limits has quite an impact on how someone might play this game.  While the physics of Tyria is little like the physics of Earth in many ways, or potentially little like other worlds that may be devised, they still have certainly been considered important.