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Physics In Video Games Essay

Decent Essays

Applying Physics to Gaming
Germain Mendoza
The article “Teaching introductory undergraduate physics using commercial video games” talks about a course that was offered to college students at the University of Texas at Brownsville that would last from December 2010-January 2011. Many games were used to demonstrate how developers of the video games used real world physics laws and applied them to the basis of the game. In the article only four were mentioned these were: “Little Big Planet”, “Shaun White Skateboarding”, “Guardian of Light”, and “Uncharted 2”. With “Little Big Planet” the college students were assigned to make a platform with frictionless glass and build an object that would move across the platform and on the object, they had …show more content…

For “Uncharted 2” the students would have to line up their reticle and shoot a Thermos flask in different spots to see how the flask would react. When shooting the flask at the top it would spin clockwise and when shot at the bottom it would spin counterclockwise then they shot the flask in the middle and the result only gave a little spin. This activity would show the students how different torques make the flask spin in different directions. Though the producers of the games try to give the players a feel of real life physics laws in the game there are always some parts that defy the laws of physics this would include: bodies going through each other, body continuing to move in a forward direction when hit by a stronger opposite force, and bodies going through floors and walls.
My interest for this article came from my great passion of playing video games and also that video games can be used for an educational purpose. From my personal experiences of video games teaching me something educational came from the well-known series of “Call of Duty” in their older version of giving the player a feel of the World Wars that happened. From those games I learned quite a bit about the World Wars including: who was on the axis side, who was on the allies side, who won the World War, and important battles

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