It's a cool post but I am very confused by the intro.

It makes the case that cars in games offer a wide variety of unrealistic experiences and says this is unlike guns.

Is that really true? I've played games with homing bullets, slow projectiles, enormous projectiles, gravity guns, rocket jumping, hit scan guns, guns with bullet drop, freeze guns, ... idunno, I think there's a lot of variety in guns that are about the experience and not about simulating physics.

> It's because when it comes to cars, we derive our expectations of them not just from first hand experience. Our understanding of what “driving fast” feels like is often built from second-hand sources; films, games, pop culture.

And then this just feels like a theorycrafted thing with zero evidence. It's also even more true of guns than of cars, isn't it?

But then, there's stuff like, uh, jumping, where there is just as wide a variety in how you can jump in games even though my expectations about jumping come a lot more from actually jumping than do my expectations about driving come from actually driving.

I’d imagine the author doesn’t have a ton of experience coding FPS games. They’re definitely not like the experience of shooting an actual gun. Games would be a lot more frustrating and boring if they were, with much lower accuracy, much more variable bullet drop, etc. It’s the same as in racing games, lots of affordances to make it feel more fun

It's a question of verisimilitude, not realism: we are looking for experiences that we can believe in.

Firearms in games tend to be less real because they prioritize making you believe in the power fantasy of a gun: it looks and sounds fearsome, and enables the bearer to dispense death. Running and jumping, likewise: there's no need to explain in an empirical sense how or why Mario jumps extremely high - it's an aesthetic choice that highlights the thing the game is about.

We tend to get stuck on portrayals of physics, camera, and photorealistic rendering in games because in those instances, we have tools that are good at systematizing verisimilitude: the car can behave more like a real car by fastidiously emulating everything we know about real cars. Those simulations can be made comparable to ones used in industry.

But many aspects of games can't take that approach and have to be cartooned to some less grounded approximation: the way in which human figures move and talk, or how a national economy works, or the pacing of combat.

As makers of designed products, we're meeting players in the middle by making choices that cohere with the rest of the game's goals while staying believable to their expectations. There are lots of ways to achieve verisimilitude while destroying the overall structure of the game, and that's a classic newbie-designer pitfall: "do X but with more detail".

The FPS example came to me spontaneously on stage and I only realized afterwards that it wasn't a good one. You make a good point.