Physics Meets the Hideous Bog Beast

COMPUTER GAMESIn the virtual world of most computer games, a programmer has carefully scripted each potential event long before you tear the shrink-wrap off your new game. While this approach worked well enough when Pong was the state of the art in video games, many game designers think it is becoming too restrictive. Their attempts to exploit advances in computer technology and inject more natural behavior into gaming have given birth to a whole new form of interactive entertainment: physics-driven computer games, in which the movement of objects depends on the forces they would be subjected to.