Digital Physics

How does a video game character visually react to being struck or shot?  How do particles like dust and debris act onscreen?  How do the environments, or objects like crates or trees, react to the likes of virtual gunfire, explosions, or melee attacks?  How do a character's limbs move as they walk or fight or stand in place, and how do electrical discharges appear in the game?  All of this pertains to digital physics.  So would computer generated effects for film and television, of course.  The people and objects in a video game have no physical presence, something hardware does not have in common; the former exists only as imagery on a screen.  Nonetheless, if the device really exists as perceived, the imagery exists, albeit without true physical form despite its causal dependence upon material hardware to exist.  Dynamic lighting (where light and shadow changes based upon real-time factors like shifting the character model position or camera), destructible environments, and more can be used to great immersive or storytelling effect—but whether due to intentional game design or software glitches, digital physics do not have to reflect the observed physics of the physical world.  

The purpose of this could be to present a universe or a corner of the universe that is explicitly distinctive from our planet and the way its matter appears to "behave."  Either way, this overlaps with a much more pressing philosophical issue than anything about mere storytelling or physics.  Storytelling and physics alike are slaves to logical possibility: nothing logically impossible—like it being true that something which follows by necessity from another concept is false or someone being both dead and alive at once—can be true.  This goes beyond physics into broader metaphysics, but digital physics depend on such truths by default.  It cannot be true that one thing which follows logically from another is false (at least in that it really does follow), because then it logically follows from something that logical necessities are not true; thus, pure reason itself can only be true.  Actual and virtual physics are constrained by consistency with reason, not the other way around.

The physics of a video game or an animated film certainly do not have to represent the behavior of particles in our sensory experiences outside of virtual entertainment: anything that is logically possible, rather than scientifically accurate as much as fallible, unverifiable perceptions can be carried, can be portrayed.  It is impossible to include any element that truly contradicts the necessary truths of reason, as logical axioms would have to still be true even if they are false, and thus are inherently correct and inescapable even in entertainment and virtual constructs.  It could never be the case that there is nothing true about a virtual world because then it would be true that there is no truth there, for example.  It is just that such metaphysically self-necessary, epistemologically self-evident axioms are true in themselves independent of real or virtual physics because they cannot be false.  Logic can be misunderstood, ignored, or denied, but it can never cease to be true and therefore can never cease to be.

Nothing shown in a work of fiction can truly be impossible, not even when the physics do not align with "real" physics (as if we can know which logically possible set of physics is really there behind the veil of perception).  What could be the case is that an idea, whether or an abstract philosophical concept or an event, contradicts a person's assumptions or expectations, whether  of a character or storyteller or viewer.  If someone holds to anything else, they are in blatant error, for true contradiction such as the untruth of logical axioms is impossible in even all fiction by virtue of being intrinsically impossible.  Necessary truths cannot be false in any instance, not even hypothetically, because, again, their falsity requires their veracity.  Any worldview holding otherwise is by necessity false and cannot even be portrayed in digital worlds with regards to their virtual physics or anything else.  At most, a character in a game or work of any other medium could only erroneously claim otherwise, regardless of if the creator is using them as a mouthpiece.  The immutable veracity of logic remains unchanged.

The way that physical (non-digital) particles, objects and environments function is confined by the fact that nothing can contradict logical axioms and other necessary truths, and so science is fully contingent on consistency with reason, as all other things are, in order for each of its tenets to even be possibly true.  The same is true of digital physics.  This means that anything that does not contradict logical axioms can be fashioned to appear onscreen, yet without the additional constraints of representing the laws of physics as they appear to us in our sensory experiences, unlike if someone was to record something like Earth's meteorological phenomena.  This is a great asset to exploring what could have been true or what one day could be.  In digital physics, we can escape what could change in our sensory experiences and the material process behind them (for scientific patterns could have been quite different and it is possible, since they are not logically necessary, for them to change at any moment) by retreating to virtual world, but nowhere can we escape strictly logical truths.