So let us pretend for a minute, a situation where you are in front of an imaginary television screen that is hooked up to your Xbox 360 with Fruit Ninja Kinect being the game of choice. Your first fruit pops up in a stylistic fashion from the bottom of the screen, and you execute a slicing motion with your arm to cut the fruit (add juicy sound effect as fruit is being cut). However, what actually goes into that single swinging motion is actually an integration of many different ones that happen subconsciously and almost instantly.

Vision is an amazing and powerful sense. The retina in your eyes alone has about ten distinct layers of a combination of neurons, photoreceptors, membranes, and other cells that allow for you to sense the outside world through your eyes. And the way that you perceive that deliciously looking fruit being popped up into the air is not just because you see a fruit; but because you also recognize spatial dimensions, the amount of luminance that is conveyed, the contrast between colors, the sense of motion found in the fruit twirling in space, and more. This package of information is transferred to what we know as the occipital lobe, or the part of the brain in the back of your head, in a pathway that involves many crossing over events and dissection of the visual field into top, bottom, left, and right compartments. In essence, the way that an image is projected on the retina is actually inverted and reversed, and when transferred to the brain, is meticulously divided further into distinct pathways of information. It is incredible that we can make sense of what we see in the first place! Furthermore, after visual recognition of an object, there are different lobes in your brain that help with the process of voluntary action through individual steps of attention to that object, the identification of what it is, and ultimately what to do or the idea of planning. Once you and your brain agree to the plan of cutting the digital fruit, your musculoskeletal system is accessed through the interface of your nervous system. Using your shoulder, chest, and arm muscle groups which are innervated by many different nerves, you are finally able to cut the fruit with your arms and achieve success!

What we perceive as a simple motion of cutting a digital fruit in a video game is actually a complicated set of mechanisms and integration of various physiological systems. I have mentioned the visual and nervous system in combination with your musculoskeletal system; however, there are more “behind the scenes” organ systems which also help you in accomplishing this task – systems such as your cardiovascular system that help to perfuse blood and energy to your muscles and brain in conjunction with your pulmonary system. If we wanted to take a step further, an added layer to the complexity is the idea of metabolism on a molecular level. Metabolism can be thought as the underlying energy industry in your body that serves to power your organ systems, and to allow the interaction and exchange between them. I’m sure that I have missed the mentioning of a plethora of other mechanisms that help me to cut my deliciously looking digital fruit, but one thing is for sure – we are amazing. Imagine what goes into a task that is a hundred times more complicated than just looking at something and swinging your arms!

-J.W.

I first fell out of the gaming loop six years ago when I made the absurd decision to buy a Mac… I had begun taking a course in Graphic Design and my teacher had managed to convince me to use the college eMacs. Being a born and bred PC user, I was initially adverse to the pretty-boy machine – to me the whole concept of having a white computer was ridiculous. It’s like buying a white car, you just don’t. And then there was the lack of a right click on the mouse – “a statement of simplicity in design and ergonomics” I was told by my design tutor at the time. Despite my reservations I found myself becoming defensive over OSX (Apple’s operating system) like a mother of a child who doesn’t seem to make any friends. The great thing was Macs were just like PCs except that no one else could use them and they seemed to exist for the sole purpose of running Photoshop – a program I had become somewhat addicted to.

As time passed I realised that Apple’s restrictive outlook on gaming was doing my productivity a world of good. Who knows, maybe not being able to waste all of those hours fragging are what meant I was successful in my application to Medicine. However, this honeymoon period was short lived since as Apple became more popular (and addressed some of its stranger software and hardware design choices) the number of games on the platform increased. Whilst I patiently waited for Steam to be ported over to Mac I had a brief (but still embarrassing) stint on World of Warcraft. My brother started playing the game at the same time as me – almost 5 years ago, I haven’t seen him emerge from his room since.

Unlike my brother, I managed to break away from World of Warcraft but this seemed to distance me even further from the gaming world. It was like Warcraft had taxed a little bit of my gaming soul for wanting to leave its immersive (yet socially crippling) universe. I detached myself from games so much that even when Portal made it over to Mac I did not play it. I know, I should be shot. In fact, in the last two years the only gaming I’ve done is the Vech’s Super hostile Series on Minecraft. I’m not sure if that even counts as gaming – to me its more of a regression to my Lego-playing days, except now I don’t have to put all the pieces back in the box after I’m finished making spaceships smash into castles.

At med school there is no denying the fact that people think I’m the geeky guy. I don’t have a problem with that; in fact it must be self-confessed geekery since I’m writing for ‘Nerdcore’. My question is how can I still be the geeky gamer when a) I’m using a Mac and b) the closest thing to a ‘game’ I play is the occasional session on Minecraft. I can only conclude that the sheer amount of FPS hours I crammed in as a kid has left a considerable imprint on my personality. An imprint I am proud of, and an imprint that will help me relate to the people I encounter later on in life.

L.A.R.F

A dear friend of mine

Newton’s third law is a scientific favorite: “To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.”  This law is also the core of competitive gameplay. If I make a move, my opponent must respond in order to neutralize the value of my move. The victor is then the player that takes a step beyond the law and causes a force greater than the potential reaction of the opponent. This is a step towards excellence, a concept that is beyond Bill and Ted and their excellent adventures. Excellence, here, is a term I will use to explain the movement beyond the expected, to excel in a field and create a noticeable division between yourself and the baseline. Overcoming an opponent’s equal and opposite reaction by performing more efficient reactions of your own generates excellence.

In a perfect competitive videogame, all playable options are entirely balanced with their own unique flavors. This is technically impossible, but let’s stick with the notion of ideal balance for now. Let’s say this game is something akin to Starcraft or Total War, where you have a selection of armies to take into battle. In this balanced game, if both players met continually with total equality, nothing would happen. What determines the outcome is the individual excellence of the player, and in games such as Starcraft and Total War, that excellence is most often generated through reaction timing. In these games, my job as a player is to evaluate my opponent, their strategy, and the best possible maneuver to shut down the enemy’s strategy. The goal is then to analyze my opponent’s action, formulate a reaction, then formulate possible reactions that they might make to my reaction, and then formulate a reaction to the new action. The deciding factor is the speed at which one player can evaluate and respond to all potential actions, plus battlefield decisions (which I have not yet spoken of).In Starcraft, the value of scouting is high. Read the enemy strategy, respond, then begin responding to the expected opponent response to your response. This process repeats itself dozens of times to varying degrees, but the saying “stay one step ahead of the game” is very true here. Just like in Chess and Risk, you must analyze your opponent and all possible moves to increase your chances of victory.

Beyond the analytical is the kinetic. In a skirmish, players can generally control their units to try and maximize their efficiency. The player with better micromanagement skills will hands-down defeat an opponent with poorer micromanagement skills in an even-army match-up. This is the kinetic form of reaction timing: taking your units and making real-time decisions within a fraction of a second. In the middle of a game of Starcraft, a player typically is faced with, within 10 seconds, producing a back-up or a response army, develop a new strategy towards facing the enemy force, analyze the current map and enemy-controlled regions, and successfully winning a skirmish. Again, these things all happen within seconds, all of which can determine whether or not the game ends up in a W or an L on your record.

This is the nature of excellence in competitive gaming: the rate and efficiency at which a player responds through individual reaction timing. This is directly proportional to what we consider to be “player skill”; the more “skilled” we consider a player, the faster and more efficient their reaction timing is.

Also, this isn’t limited to Starcraft or any war-based games by any means. All games are dependent upon reaction timing, even old-school Mario games.

- M.B

The rise of real-time strategy (RTS) games back in the ‘90s had such a legacy and cultural impact amongst the male population in the virtual world. Especially in South Korea and the United States, competitive and corporate-sponsored leagues (including participation in Major League Gaming) were created for one of the most popular RTS games in video game history, StarCraft – and yes, I was an avid StarCraft player at the prime age of 12. Although StarCraft possessed most of my time during my adolescent years, I did go to school, get a good education; and here I am now, eons later in medical school now playing StarCraft II (and learning medicine). Every time I go to my immunology class, I can’t help but think about the mechanisms of our immune system as a StarCraft game (the concept can be replaced with any RTS game of your preference). This is not because I believe that life is a game (which some may consider it to be), but there appears to be something very “real-time” and “strategic” about our bodies, particularly how our immune system works in fighting and preventing disease.

The concept of StarCraft and other RTS games is to build a military base, expand, and conquer the enemy. The ways in which to accomplish these objectives include building an array of spectacularly-looking units, matched with equally awesome-looking attacks, upgrades, and special abilities. I would propose that our immune system, although not as colorful and flashy as computer graphics, sort of works in the same way. The immune system is a wonderful and intricate defensive network created to protect a great nation of cells called the human body. It certainly has a command base, it can expand throughout the body, and it serves to conquer enemies – which we will define as pathogens. Likewise, the immune system has units, known as immune cells, leukocytes, white blood cells (all of which are one in the same), that have the ability to attack, upgrade, and certainly have special abilities against specific pathogens.

If we integrate our immune system into an RTS format, it might be described in the following ways. You could consider our bone marrow and thymus as the immune command centers of our body, creating different immune units. These units would most likely venture throughout our bodies into secondary lymphoid organs that we can allude to as bunkers, such as lymph nodes and the spleen, where these immune units can reside and defend. We have large macrophage cell units that phagocytize (eat and destroy) bacteria, which I consider to be the tanks in our immune army. There are other battle cells including natural killer cells, mast cells, and eosinophils each with their respective functions such as specializing in destroying viruses, creating allergic reactions, and defeating parasites. Some cells can even be upgraded such as T and B cells. B cells can be upgraded into plasma cells that create antibodies against pathogens, and T cells can be upgraded to have special effector functions such as being a helper or cytotoxic T cell. Before I bore you with scientific lingo and concepts, let me assure you that our immune system has many cool cells (many of which are not described here) that do a lot of cool things – to put it simply.

The proven concepts and mechanisms of our immune system are vast and cannot be contained in a blog entry (which is why we have immunology textbooks with hundreds of pages), but hopefully I have been able to elucidate the nuance that playing RTS games alludes to what actually happens in real life on a microscopic level. The immune system is a network of many fascinating cells that act as our body’s defense system. In addition, these cells are specialized in what they do, and there are other mechanisms besides cells that help in our defense (e.g. chemicals, proteins, barriers). As individuals with personalities, we think of ourselves with a single identity; however, our individuality is also comprised of billions of cells that have different functions, abilities, and power ups that allow us to be the person that we are. The next time that you play an RTS game, hopefully it will remind you of how your immune cells subconsciously work together to help protect your body.

-J.W.

It was during the autumn of 1999 that I fell in love. She was beautiful, complex, tremendously high maintenance, and from the land of the rising sun. Her name was Gran Turismo, and our relationship was tumultuous, fiery, and a constant struggle for performance and power. Horsepower, that is. In a few short weeks, I developed both admiration and awe for Japanese racing cars. The game gently goaded me into learning about real-world improvements that can be made to a vehicle in order to enhance its performance. I developed a working knowledge of drag coefficients and came to understand the delicate balance that had to be attained between torque and tire traction. Every single one of GT’s 500+ vehicles came with a detailed history of its design and manufacture process, and I soon garnered a deep admiration for the racing pedigrees behind the vehicles I saw on the street every day: Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and Mazda, to name but a few. My GT experience highlighted a fundamental principle of education to me: immersion is everything. Easily the most exciting part, though, were the lengthy discussions that would take place with friends also caught up in the world of Japanese touring car racing, bringing together the oddest groups of people. I recall an 11-year-old boy explaining to me how he managed to beat his father’s horrendously powerful Nissan Skyline GT in a less powerful Subaru WRX, simply because he stiffened up the rear suspension and invested heavily in racing tires. The result? A vehicle agile enough to corner at speeds that would cause Daddy to spin out in his horsepower-laden Goliath of a vehicle.

Game designers are constantly raising the bar for applying realism to their interactive digital experiences. Realism implies more that just photo-realistic environments. It implies the use of detailed mathematical algorithms to capture the realistic portrayal of sound, the collision of objects, the movement of a human being, etc. A favorite example of mine occurred to me while looking at a review of an old game I played on the Commodore 64 called Space Rogue. Essentially a space opera, you played a character who happened upon a derelict Scow-class space cruiser while on a routine reconnaissance mission. While exploring the craft, your own ship is destroyed by pirates, leaving you to start from scratch alone in a huge universe. Aside from its beautiful, open-ended game structure (you could choose your own adventures), the spaceflight sequences obeyed true physics principles, including that of gravity. While the rest of the world simply accepted the fact that Voyager Probes 1 and 2 were being slingshotted from planet to planet, I was actually experiencing it thanks to a few lines of code running on a processor with only 64K of random access memory. Vance Hill illustrates this beautifully in his review of Space Rogue:

“My fondest game play memory involved a binary star system where I was getting trashed by an alien, totally wrecked at the worst time. I couldn’t outrun it and I was far, far away from any help. I turned the nose of the ship to face between the two stars and hit full burn. As the gravity started sucking I started flying in faster than the ship could possibly go under its own power. I started to get pulled off course, towards one of the stars, and then… I shot between them and out to the other side, leaving the alien way back in nowheresville.”

What I’m interested in is the science behind the Medic and how the Medic heals the Marine on the battlefield. The lore behind the Medic is that the Medic uses a thin laser and an anesthetic to perform on-site surgery.  In Starcraft II, the aerial replacement for the Medic, the Medivac, operates in a similar fashion. The Medivac is an aerial dropship equipped with a healing laser beam that can fix wounded soldiers on the ground. The lore for the beam is that there are actually two beams at work: a laser-scalpel and an auto-suture, which, when combined, can patch-up all sorts of wounds. The main question, then, is “How do these things work?”. Additionally, if these fantastic elements are a little too bizarre to accept, I’d also like to explore alternative answers to the thought of battlefield healing through lasers.

The Medic uses an anesthetic and a super-hot laser beam that instantly cauterizes wounds. Okay, that makes some sense, since we have recently increased the usage of lasers in surgeries. So, in another couple thousand years, why wouldn’t lasers be able to instantly, deeply, and quickly cauterize a massive wound? What makes this a little hard to accept is the unit it targets most frequently: the Marine. A Marine is clad in thick metal armor, meant to protect the wielder from enemies and to allow them the ability to breathe and fight on foreign planets. They’re combat-geared space suits. How, then, can a laser penetrate armor meant to prevent enemy claws, guns, and lasers from getting though? Any opening the laser could get through to heal the Marine, the hole in the armor would already cause an air vacuum that would most likely suffocate and kill the Marine inside, let alone any physical damage that the vacuum would cause.

Vacuums aside, let’s suppose the atmosphere is hospitable to human life and other carbon-based species, allowing them the ability to breathe. Here, the Medic shooting a laser through an opening in the armor makes sense: if a Marine is wounded and the armor shredded, the Medic can use that same opening to cauterize the wound. Brilliant!

Returning to the original theory, there is a way to make it plausible: the Medic doesn’t actually heal the Marine but instead uses nanomachines to quickly repair the Marine’s armor as it’s being damaged. This stretches the concept a little, but it also fills a conceptual gap in unit design. I’ll leave it to the reader to mull over the nanotech / laserbeam approaches as I still have another unit to talk about.

The Medivac does the job of a Medic, but from sky, away from the immediate dangers on the ground. Additionally, the Medivac offers surgical lasers that can pinpoint and remove anything left behind in a Marine after an enemy attack, e.g, a Hydralisk spine, a Zergling claw, or even a stray bullet.

The problem is that the method of a highly controlled set of twin laser beams being sent down from an aircraft hovering over allied units is very difficult to think about in a practical way. In the game, the Medivac hovers over your units and heals them, as if it were a Medic with engines. This engine-bound Medic, however, has a laser that is shot from 40-50 feet in the air.  Theoretically, a laser will not stop once emitted, unless interfered with by an opaque object. This logic would conclude that the Medivac would operate exactly as the Medic does, but from the sky. The same goes for the nanotech repair theory, though that may be weaker from the Medivac due to distance and speed of application. It’s still shaky in theory, but the fictitious elements have certainly taken care to include and utilize real technology and theories.

Both the Medic and the Medivac are interesting cases of science fiction and a potential future of warzone healing. Perhaps the Medivac will be a real thing later on, but instead of sending lasers down to heal units, the units would be picked up, treated in the air, and dropped back off to resume fighting. As for the Medic, we already have such brave heroes on the battlefield. Maybe some lasers could help them someday soon.

- M. B

Satisfied in my thirst for knowledge (and a growing fanboyism towards the Havok system), I continued my physics abuse. Though my next point may not directly refer to the physics, it was fascinating nonetheless: weight. The game has a weight system built in to punish the player for taking too much loot, forcing the player to make value-based decisions on what to hold and what to drop. For example, if I’m at max weight (starting base is 300 units of measurement), and I decide to pick something up and it puts me over, I have to drop something to bring me back down to an even max (exactly 300) or under. If I stay above the max weight, I receive a significant cut to my movement speed. As all gamers know, movement speed is crucial to all games, and being slow is usually a bad thing.

One time, I was at 300 weight because I’m brilliant and didn’t level up my carrying capacity. Or, at least I thought I was at 300. No, I was at 300.1. That one-tenth of a weight measurement (I’m guessing lbs, but I’m really not sure) was the deciding factor between running and waddling. So, I looked in my inventory and saw a potato that managed to sneak into my gear. After tossing the potato, I was back to maximum movespeed. I suppose this is the modern rendition of “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, referring to things piling up and being too much to manage, but in this case referring to a potato that encumbered the great hero of Skyrim.

Curse you, cumbersome potato. I hope some sabrecat ate you.

My point, though, isn’t to avoid potatoes. My point is that the game, regardless of your vast strength, has an entertaining quirk (a necessary one, at that) where a simple potato can hold your hulking hero back from sprinting along and saving some estranged NPC from a dragon or a bandit. Also, there are various renditions of my potato story, including, but not limited to: Butterfly wings, mushrooms, salt, carrots, troll skulls, and your spouse’s homecooked meals.

Potatoes aside, there are some really neat mass interactions in Skyrim. My personal favorite is with the spell Telekinesis. Telekinesis lets you pick up an object within a set range and pull it towards you. However, you can also throw the object and watch the physics engine freak out in ways akin to the murderous mule cart. You see, the Havok engine, to the extent of my knowledge, registers velocity in a very sensitive fashion. If I were to pick up a goblet with Telekinesis and drop it, it would bounce a little, roll on the ground, and eventually come to a halt. If I were to throw that goblet into a pile of baskets, however, the baskets would register no resistance and scatter across the room as if a grenade were tossed at them. For those of you who have the game, I thoroughly recommend abusing this, as it is extremely entertaining and is a good way to grind levels. It’s worth mentioning that baskets are not the only potential victims, making me think that these collisions and their hilarity is fully intended by the Bethesda crew.

So far, we have a murderous mule cart, plump potatoes, and goblet grenades. What’s next? Being clubbed by a Giant.

When a Giant attacks you at early levels, it will instantly kill you and send your body hurdling hundreds of feet into the air. This is a pretty amazing collision interaction: The Giant, which is about four or five times larger than you are, slams its club onto your head, causing the force to course through you. Instead of diffusing into the ground, the force comes back skywards, sending our hero on a quest to the moon. There isn’t much more to it than that the physics engine only accounts for terrain when the Giant misses, at which time a temporary crater is formed. Otherwise, the terrain about as absorbent as a tissue in a pool.

I think that about wraps it up for the majority of Skyrim physics. However, there are more interactions that are worth noting, but the gameplay experience itself is much more gratifying than explaining them. For example, when a dragon lands, the controller and camera shake. Makes sense, considering the dragons are massive. Another interaction is with instant-kills with a bow and arrow, which propel the enemy backwards. It’s really more gratifying to do than to explain, as you get a great sensation of power and success by plowing some poor villain back into last Tuesday with a well-placed arrow.

- M. B

The answer is to continue along the path the game allotted to you, since the sequence of these dungeons is linear. However, there is one great obstacle in your path, the one thing that is truly the source of your dread: The mule cart. A simple cart meant to be drawn by a beast with the intention of delivering goods is the greatest threat in this damp dungeon of horror, but why is that? Well, there is (or at least, was. It’s probably been fixed by now) a physics issue with the mule carts of Skyrim.

Upon walking over an upturned mule cart, the cart will sporadically fly across the room and bounce off of whatever surfaces are available. Worst of all, this mule cart is deadly. That’s right, it’s a murderous mule cart with a dark past and an angry heart. I ventured down the very same dark path that you did, but my journey was abruptly cut short by this devilish fiend. However, I was apparently not the last of his victims…

Unlucky Man Attacked by Mule Cart!

Though very frightening, we must consider this incident and use it as a springboard moving forward. We must learn from this and be cautious of other “Mule Carts” in games, as they serve as constant reminders that physics aren’t always on our side. With the cart in mind, let us be thankful that our world doesn’t have flying mule carts. Or fire-breathing dragons, for that matter.

- M.B