The Clumsy Physics Of Fall Guys! | The SCIENCE of... Fall Guys!

dear fall guys i hate you so much i hate you i'm just i am so stressed out from playing fall guys and i'm blaming all of my gray hairs on you not just my new ones all of them even though most of them predate you by a number of years and oh my god why is this game so infuriating i have no freaking idea it's adorable it's got these little cartoon things that you play as that are harmless little avatars it should just be mindless joyful fun but it's not it's a vindictive rage inducing mess and i think a major part of it is the freaking controls these fall guys handle terribly it's like being a toddler all over again i wonder wonder why that is i mean from a game design perspective i kind of get it unless you create a relatively straightforward and easy to understand challenges and maps things that you look at and you immediately understand what you have to do with a little or no prompting but since the bloody fall guys handle like elephants moving through molasses it's still a tremendous challenge to navigate these incredibly simple challenges in a way that makes the crappy mechanics like kind of an equalizer i mean everyone's an equally pudgy baby who just fell out of the womb and is making their way to the finish line badly so at least when you lose you can like blame fate or luck or something instead of your own lack of skill and of course when i say pudgy baby of course i mean six foot freaking tall pudgy baby because good lord what what what they're six feet 1.83 meters tall holy crap this explains absolutely everything except for the giant fruit in fruit shoot that i literally have no explanation for an 18 foot tall orange other than monsanto must be really ahead of the game in the fall guys universe so the real question does the fall guys being canonically six feet tall explain the wonky way they control and the infuriating inability they have to walk up even mild inclines the answer is you see as hilarious as it is to imagine these pudgy monstrosities as taller than i am this tweet from the official fall guys account really isn't all that important other than to make the game somehow more hilarious no the real reason the fall guys control like actual garbage has nothing to do with their height and everything to do with their absolutely terrible physiology although being as tall as a human definitely isn't helping let's look at a fall guy compared to a human being they've got the singular the torso that's just a cylindrical meat tube they've got these big floppy arms somewhere near where their neck would be if they had one and all the way down here here of all places is uh i mean i guess you can call them legs but they're really more like feet that have been stapled to the bottom of the fall guy and let me tell you something this physiology is the worst idea ever you will pretty much nowhere in the animal kingdom see a leg body balance like this if something is this shape it's on its side and it's got like way more than two legs like roly-poly but this this thing would have gotten demolished by evolution millions of years ago because it would have been a free feeding frenzy for any predator in the oh wait i guess i guess penguins are kind of like this aren't they but penguins spend most of their hunting and evading predators time underwater where their body shape actually helps instead of hinders in any case we gotta talk about the number one super duper bad thing that makes fall guys the worst at everything and it boils down to one simple concept stability stability is a broad subject and really is a whole engineering field of study is outside the scope of this video to talk about in its entirety because like all engineering it's quite complicated and diverse and there is a lot to cover but the basics of it are really very simple and the basics are all we're gonna need for this instance since the fall guys are themselves well pretty basic and terrible and bad at everything and shouldn't exist really the crux of the problem can be found here nope not there here hit here tanya stop messing around here the feet the feet or specifically the legs or lack there of are a huge problem because what this creates is a balancing nightmare you see those of you who haven't been around really young children to see them learn how to walk may not really appreciate this but upright bipedal walking is kind of an amazing feat which is why it takes humans literally years to learn how to do it properly and our bodies have evolved over countless thousands and hundreds of thousands of years to be very good at it walking on two legs is hard which is why so few animals actually do it and it all boils down to one simple thing control of the center of mass the center of mass is the point on any object that is well the center of mass you take all the mass of a given thing like a human body add it up find the middle point and boom there you have it the center of mass for human beings it's around where the belly button is it's not exact and it varies from person to person but that's about where we have it and this is an amazing place to have the center of mass all things considered it's nice and low but crucially it's located at around the place where we can really move it around as much as possible without going too far and tipping ourselves over we can move our arms bend our torso like a hinge and even stick a leg out in order to shift where that point is exactly in space and this gives us a ton of flexibility while maximizing our stability basic stability mathematics are done using the center of mass which is sometimes called the center of gravity because that's the point at which gravity is pulling i mean in actuality it's pulling on everything but all the forces add up and concentrate on this singular point and what makes something stable or not whether or not this center of mass point moves beyond the supports this is because gravity is behaving as though it's pulling on this one point and if that point is over the support supports like your feet gravity will pull your body into those supports making you stay upright if that point moves beyond the support gravity is actually going to help pull you over like a pendulum which will pull your mass over more because it's further over and all of a sudden you're on the ground this is why you fall over if you lean too far back in your chair your center of mass has moved past the support but until you get to that point you're absolutely fine if the center of mass moves outside the range of a support holding up a body that body will fall over kinda which is what makes upright walking so freaking cool the way that we humans walk is essentially we lean forward ever so slightly which moves our center of gravity forward then we lift our leg which itself is actually quite heavy and move it forward too this moves our center of gravity even further forward past the toes on our foot that is secured to the ground which makes us unstable and we fall but before we actually fall guess what our other foot plants on the ground catching us and then magically our center of gravity is between our two supports again our two feet isn't that so freaking cool in fact our feet play a huge role in our high mobility we can lean 90 degrees forward by bending at our hips and our center of gravity doesn't go past the ball of our foot the distribution of mass in a body in relation to its supports is absolutely key to stability and this is why fall guys make no freaking sense okay so let's look at a fall guy this big blob right here assuming they're mostly a uniform density this means that most of the mass of the fall guys is concentrated in this big blobby part over 75 percent of it in fact the rest is almost entirely in the arms 23 of the mass of a fall guy is in these big blobby arm things which means they actually have a fair amount of control over the height of their center of mass being able to move it up or down by over a foot or almost 30 centimeters just by flapping their arms up and down which i figured out using a ratio of mass and vector mathematics to determine how much impact these media mitts would have these are the formulas for the interested in any case this is about all the advantage that they have because they have no freaking legs while they do appear to have a spine of some kind they have no visible hips so they have very few options for moving their center of gravity without tipping over and if they go too far they reach the point of no return and topple over immediately with no way to correct it remember the physics of walking i mentioned earlier you walk by moving your center of mass forward and because your leg is long compared to your torso you can actually lean quite a bit forward if you need to without actually hitting the ground because you can really throw your leg far out to catch you this is essentially what running is it's falling with style the fall guys can lean like at most 15 degrees forward before they start to get pulled over by gravity with no way of catching themselves they can maybe try to shuffle their feet as fast as they can to get their butts underneath their falling body to bounce it out but that's about it this is why it takes so long to slow down and speed up and why the top speed in fall guys is so abysmally slow if they go too fast they'll never be able to catch up to their center of mass in time to keep from falling on their faces and if they try to slow down too quickly their center of mass will just keep going and pull them over this is why when you jump down to an inclined area and fall guys that you personally would be able to land on with no problem these dudes just like they just can't handle it not only can they not like throw their leg forward to catch their bodies before they fall they can't even widen their stance you know like like like basketball players do in order to maximize their stability they can't crouch they can't do anything except waddle forward and if they were like little bugs this might be better but because they are absolutely gigantic humongous it means that they're actually in even more danger because the force of gravity on their bodies is stronger meaning it's going to amplify the instability by pulling harder on the center of mass since there's more mass to pull on they'd still be unstable messes if they were only a few inches tall but they'd be a lot better off since the force of gravity would be smaller they'd still fall down a lot and oh oh my god i just realized why they call them fall guys because they fall down all the time yeah that makes me hate them even more somehow anyway be thankful for your legs if you have them they are ingenious little devices that are capable of a great deal more than people give them credit for sincerely austin [Music] i'd like to give a personal shout out to my high tier patrons adam barber jared beecher emma sims francis gagnon royal gaming 16 and a damn tp nicholas spelinger marissa resnick siggy and mazer if you would like to join them and others in helping make this show possible please check out my patreon page at patreon.com the science yt we have cool rewards like personalized avatars that will get used in episodes whenever i need them early access to my videos and a discord role this shows off just how special you are [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,448,326

Rating: 4.8514481 out of 5

Keywords: fall guys, fall guys win, fall guys game, fall guys gameplay, fall guys fail, fall guys compilation, fall guys mobile, flight fall guys, the fall guys, xbox fall guys, fall guys trailer, fall guys live, fall guys free, fall guys funny moments, fall guys rage, fall guys theory, matpat fall guys, game theorists, game theory, matpat, fall guys matpat the sciencethe science of, the science of fall guys

Id: hvGirwNO4Zg

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/King_of_nerds77]

So we can get back up!

[u/FreyR_KunnYT]

There was this one drawing of a person inside a fall guy and controlling it as a robot.