Game Theory - Your Superpower Is In Your PANTS! (A Difficult Game About Climbing)

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he solves the mystery of the protagonist of A Difficult Game About Climbing! *Credits:* Writers: Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, Jerika (NekoOnigiri) and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

This loincloth, it is a champ, man. And it is hiding the goods under all scenarios right now. We should do a game theory. Maybe Tom. Maybe I'll hit up Tom. I'll be like, hey Tom, can we do an episode about the physics of this magical loincloth? Guess we're doing this? Hello, internet.

Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's holding on to its last bit of sanity for dear life. But as hard as I try, after only eight episodes, I've let go and I'm falling straight into the deep ends. Instead of covering a major game release or having a meta-discussion, about the gaming industry, I'm doing an episode on the latest rage game to hit the internet, a difficult game about climbing. If you haven't seen this game yet, well, it's right there in the title. It's a difficult game about climbing. It was created by Ponty Panthers, a spiritual successor to getting over it with Bennett Foddy,

the OG difficult climbing game. Oh, oh no, no, no, oh God, no, no! The only difference is that instead of climbing using a silly hammer, our character is climbing up this mountain with his bare hands. You'd think that would make this easier to, control, but you would be wrong. So the fact that he's sacrificing two critical points of contact is a... Ah!

Oh! Oh! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!

No! Sit for a second. I... I... No! No! What happened? How do you...

But while everyone else is posting videos of their speed runs and raid compilations, here I am doing a video no one asked for. No one, except for my boss, that is. Well, if it's an episode about loincloth physics he wants, it's an episode about loincloth physics he will get. Although, he might be getting more than he bargained for. Because by trying to answer this seemingly simple question about a piece of fabric, I was led down a rabbit hole that completely unraveled this game's universe. By the end of it, I felt like I had climbed a mountain with my bare hands.

Turns out, there is more to this man that meets the eye, and I'm not talking about what he's hiding under that cloth. I mean, the science of this game is weird. And it causes all kinds of domino effects that I did not expect to be thinking about when playing a foddy in game. There are so many questions that I didn't need answers for that I now have answers for. So, in typical theorist fashion, I'm now going to share them all with you. Without further ado, I present to you a difficult theory about a difficult game about climbing. Before we discuss any physics about our climber's modesty garment, we first need to discuss the physics of the climber himself. And man, this guy is a beast.

He's not only able to climb up the entire mountain and city and clouds without even breaking a sweat, but he's doing it without a harness and without you. using his feet. What is rock climbers call it? Free soloing or campusing. Sorry about the whispering. There's a certain member of team theorist who is an avid rock climber and I'm worried that if he hears me, he's going to try and interrupt me again. Regardless, our climber is able to do all of this without even having to take a break. That takes some serious grip strength and endurance. Either this man is the strongest man to have ever lived or there's something else going on. And I think you guys can figure out which one I'm leaning towards. See, the thing that got my

attention wasn't just how good our player was holding onto the mountain, but instead what happens when he inevitably falls all the way down. Can I please climb on top of the rock and sit for a second? I, I, I, I, I, I, no! That buoyancy, do you see that? I did see that. My guy shoots up out of the water like he's some sort of boy, but why? Well, if you remember anything from your fourth grade science class,

you know that the physics of buoyancy all come down to density. Density is a measure of how much mass an object has per unit of volume. And if you know the density of an object, you can easily figure out whether it will float or sink in a particular fluid. If an object is more dense than the fluid, it sinks. If it's less dense than the fluid, it floats. Pretty easy stuff, all of which we've covered in a couple of theories. But today, we're going to be taking things one step further.

Because not only can you use density to figure out if an object will float, but you can also use it to tell how much of it will float. If an object is half as dense as the fluid it's floating in, then half of the object's volume will end up submerged underwater. The more you increase the density, the higher the proportion of that object will be underwater. So, to put that into math terms, when it comes to an object floating in fluid, the ratio of the densities of the object to the fluid is equal to the ratio of the volume of the object that is submerged to its full volume. I sound like such a nerd. Typically, humans have a density of 985 kilograms per cubic meter, and water has a density of 997 kilograms per cubic meter, making humans less dense than water, and so we float.

So my guy here is suspiciously buoyant. It's almost as if our climber is way less dense than a person typically should be. He shoots up out of the water like a bath toy you've submerged during bath time as a kid. No, just me? Anyway, weird childhood aside, we should be able to figure out why this is happening by using that formula. All we need to know is what percentage of our object, or in this case, our climber, is submerged when he's chilling at the bottom of the mountain after falling for the 11th time. But to do that, I needed to know exactly how tall he is.

Can you see why this episode broke me? Okay, so, how tall is the player in a d'clock? difficult game about climbing. At first glance, he seems like a fairly tall guy, but that's not very scientific now, is it? No, for this, I needed to do something special. For the first time, as host of the channel, I needed to pull out the pixel measurements. Scattered around your trek up the mountain are plenty of objects that could serve as potential measuring sticks. Sadly though, most of them either have no standard sizing, or if they do, they come in a variety of standard sizes. Things like the steel drum and street science can be one of several sizes, and don't even get me started on the

variety of clothing sizes. Probably a style theory in there somewhere. Anyway, all of those would massively throw off our calculations if we picked the wrong size. So I kept looking and kept looking until I found one thing that comes in one size and one size only, a concrete road barrier. Specifically, this type of concrete barrier is known as an F-shaped barrier, which feels like false advertising. It doesn't look anything like an F. But regardless, thanks to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation officials, we know exactly how tall these barriers are. Everyone, your copy of the AASHTO Roadside Design Guide fourth edition that I know you all have lying around somewhere and turn to page 164. You'll see that your F-shaped concrete barrier has a standard height

of 32 inches. So by comparing that to the size of our climber, our pixel measurements show that he is almost exactly 6 foot, 5 inches or nearly 2 meters tall. For clarity, that's the same height as Bo Burnham, which is certainly tall, but at least it's realistic. I was worried we were going to have another warrior as 10 foot situation on our hands. But now that we have our tall, we have our tall our character is, we can scale our character model to that height in Blender. And using the volume measuring tool, we can conclude that his total volume is 0.1057 cubic meters. Okay, we're nearly there. We just need to compare the footage from in-game to see where to slice the 3D model.

And by doing so, we can see that around 33% of his volume, or 0.035 cubic meters, is submerged underwater. Finally, we plug all that information into our formula from earlier, set the density of the water to be 997 kilograms per cubic meter, and we find that the density of our climber is... Drumroll, please! Thrum roll! 330.13.13.133 kilograms per cubic meter. No wonder he's so buoyant.

For context, that's about as dense as bamboo, which has been used to make rafts all over the world for hundreds of thousands of years, thanks to its buoyancy. No need for expensive plane fares if this guy's your buddy. Just attach a motor to his feet and jet across the ocean. It's not just his density that's on the lighter side either. With his volume and the formula for density equaling mass over volume, that means that he only has a mass of 41.3 kilograms or 91 pounds.

When a typical person of his size would be expected to weigh 104 kilograms or 222 pounds. That actually explains why our climber is able to swing and stop himself so easily. Newton's first law of motion states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. The thing that decides how much unbalanced force is required to change the position of an object is known as the object's inertia. And that is heavily affected by an object's mass.

If something has a high mass, it has a high inertia. And therefore, it makes it really hard to get that object to start moving. And hard to get it to stop too. In the case of our climber, though, his low mass means he has a lower inertia. And so he would be able to stop his swing almost instantly, which is exactly what we see in the game. game. Maybe the physics of this world do make sense after all. Ha! Yeah, right. You guys know I couldn't stop there.

Despite the fact we just calculated that our climber is lighter than we would have expected, something about it still doesn't make sense. Whenever you fall in this game, you fall like a rock. Way faster than it feels like a person should. But if it's not his own mass that's causing that, then that would mean something is off with the gravity. On Earth, you may know that the acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second squared. That is the acceleration that all objects on feel. If you drop two objects at the same time, no matter how massive they are, they will always fall at an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared. Galileo figured out this principle back in the late 1500s with two different weighted spheres. And when the Apollo 15 astronauts

went to the moon, they dropped a hammer and a feather to figure out that the objects fell at 1.625 meters per second squared. In short, as long as you have an object of any mass and drop it from a known height, you can calculate exactly what the acceleration is due to gravity on any planet via Earth, or perhaps wherever this game takes place. This first boulder feels like a pretty good jumping off point. Don't want to spend hours on this after all. I have way too many things to target my rage app, like the new poppy book that just dropped. But since we've already figured out the height of our climber,

we can use him as a measuring stick to figure out exactly how high this very first boulder we climb is. Using more pixel measurements, we can measure that the distance between his feet and the surface of the water is 223.1 inches, or around 5.7,000. meters. Then we just let him drop. And measure how long it took for his feet to touch the surface. After repeating the experiment five times, just to be safe, I found that the average time it took for his toes to first connect with the water was about 0.81 seconds. We plug that into our formula for acceleration of a falling object, which is the change in distance minus the initial velocity times time, with all of that then multiplied by two and then divided by times squared.

From there, we get an acceleration due to gravity of 19.853 meters per second squared, which is just more than two times that of Earth. Sounds impressive, but remember, his mass is lower than it should be for his height. So is his Dragon Bullsie gravity chamber approach to strength training actually more impressive than a regular rock climber? Well, earlier I said a normal person on Earth at 6 foot 5 would have a mass of around 104 kilos. If we use our classic force equals mass times acceleration formula, with the acceleration of Earth's gravity being 9.8 meters per second squared, then the force that person would need

to pull himself up would be 120 newtons of force. But if we do the same for our climber, using the mass and gravity we've already calculated, it turns out he would need a force of 692 neutrons to carry himself up. That is 32% less force than that of the real world. No wonder he's able to climb for so long without a break. He's practically floating up the cliff face. I'm sure rock climbers everywhere would kill for that kind of weight off. But while his climbing ability may not be that impressive,

it's finally time to talk about the most impressive thing of this game. The thing I've been teasing since the beginning, yes, it's finally time to talk about the law. Loin cloth. Although, technically speaking, a loincloth that is held up at the waist by a belt is actually called a breech cloth. I'm just saying. And actually, actually, if you want to be super technical, in the game files, this covering is known as a bum cloth, because there isn't actually any cloth covering the front. Meaning all those bushes and boulders are going to be brushing and scraping all up against his personal boulders. Forget buoyancy. Boy, I can't unsee that. So, what is going on with this cloth? There are three main factors that I could see when playing this game. Firstly, based on the way it flaps around, it's clear that this cloth is pretty thin.

You're not going to get movement like that from a cloth that's thick and stiff. Secondly, when you get out of the water, the fabric doesn't seem to be wet. The water just falls right off, which means that it has to be pretty waterproof. Finally, it has to somehow stop our climber from having any Marilyn Monroe moment as he falls head first down the mountain. What material could be both thin enough to flow in the wind, yet stiff enough not to flop all over the place and reveal the goods? And is also able to be waterproof at the same time. hours of research online and manhandling every cloth at my local fabric store, I finally have an answer to this incredibly pointless question. This magical loin cloth isn't actually magic at all.

It's just canvas. Now I know, when you think of canvas, you think of the thick material that artists paint on, but canvas can be made at all sorts of thicknesses depending on the need. They can be thick enough to support painting, or they can be thin enough to make flexible bags, and yes, even cloths, all while remaining super strong. This is where our gravity conversation from earlier comes into play. With the gravity of this world being much stronger, any material we use would weigh almost twice as much, meaning the canvas could remain relatively thin, but it'll still act like a heavier version of that same fabric, helping to keep the cloth falling downwards and hiding the goods at all times. Furthermore, if we zoom into a piece of canvas,

what you'll find is either cotton or linen that has been weaved together in what is known as a plain woven style, a standard over-under weaving technique. Did I get that right, Amy? Please, I desperately need validation. And if we at a very, extract the texture used for the bumcloth from the game files, what do we see? A plain weave. We even see the fraying that is typical of canvas fabric. And finally, while no natural material is ever going to be 100% waterproof, canvas does have some waterproof properties. As any painter would tell you, you typically don't paint watercolor on canvas. Why? Because canvas isn't very absorbent. In the early 19th century, canoes used in North America were lined with canvas for that exact

reason. People have been using canvas to keep things waterproof for hundreds of years. And fun fact, you can actually make canvas even more waterproof. All you need to do is treat it with some sort of wax or oil and boom. It'll be like water off a duck's back or water off a climber's backside, I suppose. This is why canvas was the go-to material during the age of sailing and pirates. Sailcloths were commonly made of canvas because they were strong, lightweight and relatively waterproof. And wouldn't you know it at the bottom of the mountain right next to where you start the game? do we see? But a ship with a ripped sailcloth. This ship belongs to our climber. He became shipwrecked on these rocks. His clothes were soaking wet and torn. And so he decided to fashion a loincloth

out of the canvas and climb the mountain to safety. The only thing the canvas doesn't fully explain is how even despite the heavy gravity, it never falls past his buns of steel, even when he's fully upside down. Maybe there is some kind of magic in this world. That or this guy has one heck of a shelf back there that it physically can't fall past, respectfully of course. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.