Jumpman

In platformer games, it's quite common to use various physics tricks to make the game feel better. For example, you can still jump even if you've (very slightly) fallen off the platform already, and you can land on a platform even if you (very slightly) miss it. Most of the tricks are fairly minor ways of making physics a bit forgiving, but there's one huge departure from reality that almost nobody notices: you can influence your movement in mid-air. This isn't just a minor cheat, it's basically throwing out a large chunk of the laws of the universe. But we don't even notice!

Why is this? How can we not feel totally aliented by finding out that our supposed avatar in this world just... pushes himself through the air? My theory is that, deep down, we actually feel like we do live in a universe where we can change our direction in mid-air. It's not surprising to us when we press the left button and Mario moves left despite no plausible physical basis; it's surprising in real life that after we jump we can no longer control our movement. The game is just being generous by making the universe work the way we, deep down, feel like it should.

And I don't think this applies only to physics. The idea of a situation being totally out of our control is very difficult to accept, to the point where most of the time we just don't accept it. A lot of the circumstances of your life are dictated at birth, but nobody wants to believe that. You can't make good things happen in your life by really really wanting them, yet that's the thesis of a bestselling book. And you can't get things done faster or make more time in a day just because you will it to be so.

That's not to say there aren't ways to affect how long something takes, or many other things that happen in your life. But you influence them by pushing on something, much the same way as you jump by pushing against the ground. You can push on which opportunities you pursue, push on how many things you try to get done, or push on how effectively you work. The one thing you can't do is push on nothing and expect movement. Real life doesn't work like that.