Videogames can do whatever they like with their physics. They don't have to follow our so-called laws of nature. Yet there are indeed rules in every game, otherwise the motions of characters wouldn't make any sense. But what are the rules? What physics govern the motion of in-game stuff?

That's where the real game begins: finding out the in-game physics. It's just like doing real physics except it's cheaper, because you only need the game and not something like a giant particle accelerator.

For this experiment, I am going to be looking at Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on the Nintendo Switch. The goal of the game is to fight other fictional characters. But you can choose just about any of the Nintendo characters from previous games. That means you can have a battle between Pac Man and Mario.

I've done this videogame stuff before—for example, the physics of Angry Birds. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, however, offers something extra fun. It has a training mode where you can test out two characters' different moves. The best part is that you can control a virtual camera and have it stay zoomed out. This makes it easier to collect motion data. They also included some grid lines in the background as a measurement scale. It's as if the developers created this game just for me.

Video Analysis of a Jump

I will start with a seemingly simple but important move: jumping straight up. In this case I am going to use the Captain Falcon character, for no particular reason. Screen capturing seems to be disabled for this game, so I had to record the actual TV with my phone. It seems to work out just fine though. After that, I can use video analysis (Tracker Video Analysis) to get a nice plot of the position as a function of time for Captain Falcon during his jump. This is what I get.

Rhett Allain

So, what can we get from this plot? First a quick note: I am going to assume the distance units for the grid are in meters. Why? Well, that would put the height of Captain Falcon at around 1.9 meters (around 6.2 feet), and that seems reasonable. Actually, I guess I should point out that there are three important things about jumping in any video analysis.