HOW TO BUILD A BLACK HOLE
Gravity is one of the simplest and most complicated things in existence. It’s both as straightforw ard as jumping, and a source of cosmic machinations and monsters that defy the imagination. The entity holding you to the ground right now is the same principle of attraction that leads to black holes – exhausted stars that have collapsed under their own mass, growing denser and denser until, at last, they form a vortex so absolute that time deforms and not even light can escape the pull.
Videogames have been wrestling with gravity since the medium’s birth, from the geometric landslides of Tetristo the Jenga-esque launch vehicle physics of full-blown 3D space sims. These games can be a useful means of visualising equations and phenomena you’d otherwise need a PhD to understand, but most games compromise with reality out of necessity or simply in the name of fun. They are their own little bespoke universes – and even those that adhere sternly to the science struggle to portray the ideas put forward in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
UPWARDLY MOBILE
Before we get to Einstein, however, let’s talk Mario. Working out how to make a character fall in a platformer is one of game development’s bread-and-butter challenges. It sounds simple enough: you subtract a certain vertical distance from the character every frame unless there’s something in the way. But getting a leaping character to ‘feel’ right can take months of work, because everyday gravity is generally more inconvenient than enjoyable. To make it
