The biggest lie in video games

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In 1987 I told myself I'd stop playing video games until I could fish on a flying broomstick above fake water

The biggest lie in video games are those mobile game ads where the game is not like the ad at all 😭 Nice video bro

It’s not water it’s pixels silly

To be fair, games are also lying to you about air.

Video games are filled with tricks to make things easier to render. Even though they are technically lies, I personally wouldn't call them lies since they are just ways of displaying something without having to do expensive computations.

now you gotta add a huge horrifying fish creature that eats you if you wander too far out and traumatizes the player for life

Of course there's no water in videogames. Water harms electronics, no way they would put it in your computer

literally NOTHING in a game is real, not just water, water is usually over-analyzed like this because it looks cool and for a long time it was always a "novelty" to have it done correctly. But the tricks that we do in waters are no difference than fog, smoke, grass and even collision detection. almost nothing in a game is "real" if we follow your fluid simulation logic.

"Video games lie to you. This is not water" The ground is also often just a mesh with no volume, and some behavior that prevents you from falling through. The water is just as real as that. If Minecraft tells me that block is water, it's water. As long as it's implemented in a way that looks consistent with the rest of the world, there's no reason to label it a lie. Every game has the freedom to choose how realistic it's going to be. Expectations like "Water is only water if it looks and behaves identical to real-life" are really not fair. It's nice to see an effort of explaining certain mechanics under the hood of game engines, but labeling them "lies" really does not sit well with me.

"The biggest lie." You realize many parts of a video games are cheats and lies? It's all shortcuts and magic tricks.

A reminder once again. The final bit that makes something GOOD versus ok...is always sound. Sound carries SO much more than people realize. It makes or breaks many many many things.

5:02 „it‘s completely free and you even get 30% off with my link in the description“ 😂

The biggest lie in video games when you get a mobile ad with a fake X that opens the app store 💀

7:03 "under water areas also create the expectation that there's something to do" So Fallout 4 with it's cut content of an underwater vault where you fight a kraken at the end. There was at least one person who spent several hours swimming through every inch of Fallout 4's waters to see if there were any secrets and found nothing. It's a travesty we didn't even get under water content in a DLC

The plural of vertex is not vertexes, its vertices. The craziest water lie I can think of is in the Build engine that games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood used. That engine still wasn't fully 3D, but actually 2D info projected into a 3D simulation using digital witchcraft. So the way water worked was, unsurprisingly, super weird. One of the limitations of those old pseudo 3D engines was that you couldn't have a room above another room. Each sector could only have a single floor and ceiling height value. But these games had areas with what seemed like rooms over rooms. The way the did that was by placing the rooms next to each other in separate sectors, instead of above one another, and sneakily teleporting you between them. usually, climbing a staircase or riding an elevator would actually teleport the player, instead of simply connecting the areas like they seemed to. This allowed for more complicated level design than previous games like Doom were capable of, and even some real physics defying stuff too. And the way water worked was similar. When you were on the surface of a pool of water, you were actually simply standing on the floor of the sector. But it had special properties that made your character sit lower on it and bob up and down slightly to make it feel like you were chest deep in water. And to let you go underwater, when you hit crouch, you would actually teleport to the ceiling of a different sector that was the underwater area. This sector had more special properties like adding a blue filter to the screen, muffled the sound effects, and putting the player in a special flying mode that simulated swimming. And if you touched the ceiling again, it would teleport you back to the surface sector again. It sounds crazy, but especially in 1996, it was totally convincing.

The entire art of video game development is pretty much making things look convincingly not what they actually are

Imagine not having water caustics

Fishing on brooms... my guy, you have to create a situation where something so big bites that it drags your little witch friend along. I need to see high speed fishing boss battles. Make this the dark souls of witchy fishing games.

Everything in videogame graphics is "lies" by this standard. Those people? They're hollow inside. They're balloons. Buildings? Also frequently hollow and empty inside. Air resistance? Wind? That definitely isn't being simulated. A human using a hand to pick up a coffee mug, and take a sip? Chances are all of that is pre-animated and none of it is left to physics, and if you want them to do something different with that mug, like pick it up with three fingers instead of two, shake it, dump it out, juggle with it, hang it from one finger, probably all animated. None of it is physics between the fingers and the mug. If I take my hand and grab my arm, you can visibly see my skin stretch, freckles moving towards where my arm is grabbed. My flesh also bulges a bit as it's pushed away from the grab spot. Unlike water I can't think of any games that even TRY to do any of that graphically. Maybe, maybe, if you're playing a very polished game the hand will exactly touch the arm without passing through. Honestly, game water seems pretty good by comparison. There's games where they let you interact with water in lots of ways and it all looks pretty reasonable. But can you name a game where they let you do anything you want with human hands and it looks good? Nearly every game is like "oh god, oh fuck, oh no, we're not doing that! Here's a list of animations you can have the hands play. NOTHING else!"