Video Games And Math

 

Video games are a part of our lives. It doesn't matter where you look, they are there.  Many are point and shoot while others are look for three of a kind.  For students who want to make game design a career, math is extremely important.  Today, I'll be discussing the math behind Super Mario.

Math is used to determine how characters move, items fly across the sky, even juggling things. If math wasn't used, the game would not exist.  Now, there are some programs such as Maya which is a math based program that calculates vertices and normals as the artist uses a tool to create three dimensional graphics without calculating the math themselves.  Other math is done when the program is run by the game engines.  On to the specifics of Super Mario. When Mario jumps up and down, he is not going straight up and down but actually jumping in a parabolic shape so it shows movement.  

Another game, the Kerbal Space Program, relies on math so much.  The game has to simulate Newtonian physics using math so the rocket can get off of the ground and out into space.  One has to calculate the amount of thrust needed for the rocket to get off its launch pad, through the atmosphere, into space.  Without math, this game would be quite boring and flat.  

When designing the game, math may not play as much of a roll as it does when the game is actually created but when the game is finished, everything has to mirror real life and math does that.  Using math such as dot product, cross products, scaling vectors, unit vectors, and vectors in general, reflection, matrices, scalar manipulation, trig functions such as sin, cos, and tangent, delta time, range and domain, makes the velocity of particles correct, the spread of a shotgun blast, and the proper bounce of a ball as it bounce along the road.   In general, the more complex the requirements of the world, the more math required to make it real.

Furthermore, math brings entertainment to the game by blending everything into the whole world so it is fully interactive rather than semi interactive. It brings the excitement of bullets flying around your character as you work your way through the situation.  Math in the game simulates fluid water, animates everything, runs algorithms, sets up the game engine architecture, all the movement such as walking, shooting, and jumping, analyzing character interaction, runs timers, replicates the physics, and so much more. 

So if a student wants to know where math is used in real life, you can point to video games and you can let them know that without math, their favorite games wouldn't be as much fun or as real.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.