VIDEO GAMES: How SCIENCE shapes GAME DESIGN

In 2011, a video game allowed players with no scientific training to solve a structural biology problem in three weeks that had stumped researchers for ten years. The game was called Foldit, and participants had to virtually "fold" proteins to find their final shape, thus helping to decipher the mechanisms of diseases such as Alzheimer's or Ebola. It sounds like science fiction, but it is the sign of a more radical truth: modern game design is not born only from creativity, but from its marriage with science – and often, science learns more from games than we imagine. We are used to thinking of video games as pure entertainment: graphics, stories, challenges, escape. But this view is short-sighted. In reality, every gaming success is based on a surprising amount of physical laws, mathematics, acoustics, artificial intelligence, and statistical models. And the relationship between science and video games has been close since the beginning: the first video game in history, Tennis for Two, was created in 1958 by physicists at the Brookhaven laboratory precisely to show science to the public. It was not intended for entertainment, but as a tool for dissemination: a ball passing through an oscilloscope to demonstrate the power of new computing tools. Yet, from the very beginning, the temptation to play with the machines was irresistible. David Louapre, former scientific director of Ubisoft, says that many of the first computer scientists were, after all, curious children: as soon as they could, they transformed very expensive machines into prototypes of video games, as happened with Spacewar!, a battle between spaceships created on university mainframes in the 1960s. Astrophysicist Roland Lehoucq, on the other hand, remembers the first time he tried Pong at a friend's house, on an old Thomson console: "It was a simplified tennis game, but behind it were the same physical rules that I explained in the lab." But the science in video games doesn't stop at Newtonian physics. With the arrival of the third dimension and realistic graphics, technical limitations have imposed ingenious solutions: a modern game updates millions of pixels every 16 milliseconds, calculating reflections, shadows, movements, collisions, and fluids. To simulate water, for example, you can't really solve the complicated Navier-Stokes equations: you take shortcuts, you falsify the data, you use graphic tricks that give the illusion of real physics. Yet, if the surface seems believable, the player feels immersed and forgets the difference. It's the same logic as in science fiction, says Lehoucq: it doesn't matter that everything is true; what matters is that it's plausible, that the user's intuition is respected. A perfect example is Outer Wilds, a 2019 game in which the virtual solar system was designed to truly follow Kepler's laws: if you launch an object with the right speed, you can see it go into orbit, just as Newton imagined with his "mountain cannon." Lehoucq has timed the orbits of the planets and confirms: "The ratio between the cube of the semi-major axis and the square of the period is constant, just as physics dictates." But the simulation is never complete. Take Mario jumping: he falls more slowly than he rises, and you can control the fall with the stick. This is impossible in the real world, but necessary for the game to be fun and accessible. In 2D, you can easily cheat. With the transition to 3D, however, physics engines have to get closer and closer to realism, while still leaving room for the creative "cheats" that make the gameplay enjoyable. Sound is also a scientific laboratory. In the beginning, limited memory forced everything to be synthesized with square waves, creating that 8-bit sound that has become iconic. Today, real-time sound generation uses algorithms that simulate distance, materials, and obstacles to give the player fundamental spatial cues: think of Rainbow Six, where understanding an enemy's position from the noise makes the difference between winning and losing. But the most interesting twist comes in the present day: science not only fuels video games, but is beginning to use video games to discover new results. Foldit is just one of many examples of gamified "participatory science." And the same rendering technologies for games – GPUs – are now at the heart of artificial intelligence, accelerating the computation of neural networks and generative models. In practice, video games have become a gigantic distributed laboratory: every game, every choice, every bug fixed is also a step forward in scientific research, often without us noticing. And as new generative AIs begin to write dialogue, create behaviors, and even help with game programming, the line between science and entertainment is becoming increasingly blurred. In short: video games are not the enemy of scientific culture, but its most effective and accessible training ground. They are not just a way to distract ourselves, but a way – perhaps the most powerful one we have today – to learn without realizing it, and even to produce new knowledge. If you thought game design was just art and fantasy, you should know that every jump Mario makes, every wave in the sea of Zelda, every orbit in Outer Wilds, are also a lesson in physics, mathematics, and neuroscience. On Lara Notes, there's a gesture you won't find anywhere else: I'm In. It's not a heart; it's not a thumbs-up. It's your declaration: this idea now belongs to you because the next video game you try will also seem like a small science lab. And if tomorrow you tell someone that Foldit players beat real biologists, on Lara Notes you can report it with Shared Offline: that way, the person who was with you knows that the conversation really mattered. This Note comes from France Culture and saves you 49 minutes of listening.