(mouse clicks)
- [Voiceover] Dear Bennett Foddy,
dude, just-- just-- get out-- get out now!
Just go! Go!!
Because you know what? I take back what I said on Twitter.
I take back saying that I don't get mad playing
Getting Over It.
Because you know what? You know what, Foddy?!
I am freaking mad!!!
(choir singing)
This was supposed to be a simple episode.
A simple episode about levers.
I chose to do a simple episode because,
well, this is coming out who knows when.
I'm working on this right before Christmas.
And my last topic, the one on the economics of
Cuphead fell through.
Normally, I'd feel bad about that.
But since the topic seemed capable of
confusing even Nobel Prize winner and father of behavioral
economics Richard Thaler,
I'm gonna give myself the a pass.
"Do an episode of Getting Over It," I told myself.
Why not something easy before the year is over?
Just a basic forces in, forces out,
big numbers on screen, yell a little,
and rake in that sweet,
[laughs like a phsyco]
Was I wrong!!
Oh GOD, was I wrong!
And, I have to say,
a pretty great pleasure,
oh, the greatest pleasure to say, Getting Over It,
Getting Over It makes no,
none, not a single
Goddamn sense!
But, before I continue,
I'd like to bring you a message from this episode's sponsors.
This week's science is brought to you by
Single malt cast strength Arbelour
Maximum Strength Ibuprofen,
Ranitidine 75 milligrams,
Calcium Carbonate, and Sertraline.
Biochemistry: keeping Austin's body and mind
functioning just enough to keep the constant
churn of content...
(gasps for air silently) ...churning!
(TV static sound effect)
Getting Over It, for those of you who don't know,
is the latest outrage machine developed
by Bennett Foddy, the dude who made QWOP.
As if we needed another meme-y thing that just made us mad.
Getting Over It is an unapologetic exploration
of uncompromising game design.
But what it mostly is is freaking hard!
From Foddy's own mouth,
it is an homage to Sexy Hiking,
a way, way more broken game.
The story is pretty simple.
You're Vin Diesel stew,
and your tasked with climbing over stuff,
or getting over stuff.
That's it! That's the thing.
All you have is this hammer to swing
and it seems simple, right?
Wrong!!
This mechanic while simple in a game world
is utterly, mind-blowlingly complicated!
I spent an entire day scratching my head over this,
consulting drawings, like some sort of
Renaissance scientist who drunk too much mercury!
Because, well, the physics of this game
is unbelievably complex.
You know what's amazing?
Six simple concepts utterly change the
entire course of human technology.
(TV static sound effect)
The wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined freaking plane,
the wedge, the lever, and the screw.
Known as the "Six Simple Machines",
these six different concepts could be applied either
independently or together to create things capable of
doing... well, just about anything.
Transforming forces, these things are still in use today.
And, as you may have guessed, the one we're picking today is
the lever.
Levers are one of the most incredible machines.
And when properly applied, it kinda makes you feel like
you're cheating the universe.
With a long enough lever, a 50 kilogram person can
lift a 100 kilogram person.
No problem!
Even if they weren't ordinarily capable of
lifting them just by hoisting them aloft.
And believe it or not, when you use a lever to lift something,
even though it may seem easier to you,
you're actually doing just as much work as if you were just
dead-lifting them.
But how?
Well, let's look at this simple lever here.
A class 1 lever.
Just a beam over a fulcrum.
Like a see-saw.
Now, you have 100 kilo on the right, and 50 kilo on the left.
What happens?
The 100 kilo person moves down and the 50 kilo person rises up
into the air, since all things being equal, the force of a
100 kilo person is much higher.
But what if, say, you were going to move the fulcrum over to the right
until it were, say,
1 meter way from the 100 kilo person
and 2 meters away from the 50 kilo person?
The opposite would happen.
Magic? Nope!!
But why?
Because of distance.
Now, many people when trying to describe
why levers work make this huge mistake
of making it sound like,
the reason levers work is because the force of the lever
is transferred across the longer section of the lever.
Which is why, somehow, it works.
But that's not it.
It's actually the distance the objects move at the
very ends of the lever that makes difference.
Alright. So, here's what happens.
At the fulcrum, when the lever moves,
on both sides, it changes by the same angle.
And using our good old Pythagorean Theorem,
we know that on the longer side, the 2 meter side,
the distance the lever moves down on the 50 kilo side
is actually twice as far as how high the 100 kilo side moves.
So if you push the 50 kilo side down half a meter,
the 100 kilo person is going to rise only one quarter of a meter.
And this is how the magic happens.
By spreading out the force over a longer distance,
you are still inputting the same amount of energy.
Which is force over a distance.
In order to move an object,
you must always use the same amount of energy.
Which is "force × distance".
Therefore, you can use less force if you
increase the distance over which you applied that force.
And that is the magical science of levers.
You're gonna do the same amount of work,
but you're doing it for longer.
Which, when you're dealing with force output limitations,
like, say, with muscles,
which have built-in limitations
due to the nature of aerobic and anaerobic respiration,
reducing the force needed makes things feel easier.
Even though, for the most part, as far as the universe is concerned,
The checkbook of energy remains balanced.
This is why Archimedes reportedly said that
he could move the Earth if he had a long enough lever.
Never mind the thing would need to be
ten million light years long in order to
make a noticeable difference.
All levers take advantage of this principle.
Lengthen the distance you apply the force
in order to require less of it.
There are three classes of levers,
with fulcrums in different places.
And, well, I could
get into all of them,
but, who cares?!
They don't apply here!
Because, well, first, it kinda looks like
the dude in Getting Over It is using levers to his advantage.
This could not be further from the truth!
But first, we're gonna need hard numbers.
Which actually is kinda a pain in the butt to find.
There's a lot of junk in Getting Over It,
which is kind of the point of the whole thing.
But, when it comes to do pixel measurements,
these things are, well, they're not to scale
and most of them don't really exist in real life.
But, after hacking the gravity of the game,
so I could do some exploring,
I found this, a red phone booth.
based on the London design,
these things, for a long time, were all over the place.
The most prolific of them being the K-6 models.
Which were 2.51 meters high.
Boom! Close enough for government work.
Using this, and the beauty of pixel measurements,
I determined that the hammer Vin Deisel uses
is 1.18 meters long.
And he's capable of swinging it at a top speed
of 9.3 meters per second.
The real impressive stuff is when you look at how
quickly he can rotate himself.
Using some trigonometry,
some sweet old πr²,
we learn that he is capable of rotating himself
at 2.5 meters per second from a dead stop
with an acceleration of 11.55 meters per second squared
or five and a half miles per hour and 25.8 miles per hour squared
respectively.
Now, it took me a lot of experimentation
both in real life with some pencils that are
now broken
and in the game to figure out exactly how
he's raising himself off the ground with this
damned hammer.
And here's how it works.
The outermost hand, right here,
is the fulcrum.
He pushes down on that which can burst force
down the length of the hammer into the ground.
Then, with the hand closer to him,
he pulls up, so he rotates around the other hand.
With these mismatched forces, he'e capable of lifting himself
off the ground! Seems simple right?
Wrong!!
I tried running this experiment myself with pencils,
and I nearly broke my own fingers trying to
get my hand to lift me off the table.
You can try it yourself if you want.
But, after a couple of hours messing around,
I came up with an experiment.
One water bottle filled with water
with a wrench clamped to it to act as the hammer.
Together, these things weigh 735 grams.
Using this, I kid you not,
a cast iron hook meant for hanging plants,
I was able to perfectly mimic the application
of forces from the game.
And, it took over 4.5 newtons in order to get the forces
to balance out and achieve lift-off.
Now, that seems nothing to you?
Ha! Well, let me contextualize that.
The 735 grams of the water bottle and the wrench,
that, under the Earth's gravity, is .735 newtons.
This means, the force needed to lift them just barely
was 612 percent higher.
I had to apply 4,500 grams of force to raise 735 grams of water.
Holy crap! But, whoa, it gets so much worse.
That is with an acceleration of 6.12 meters per second squared.
In order to get the 11.55 meters per second squared from the game,
I'd need 8.49 newtons.
The equivalent of nearly 8 and a half kilograms
to lift something that's not even three-fourths of a kilogram!
And that's not even getting into lifting a freaking person!
I weigh about 68 kilograms,
and as a result, it would take over
786 kilograms of force
in order to lift me this way.
Or over 1,733 freaking pounds!
Eddie Hall dead-lifted 500 kilograms and holds the world record of
all weightlifters.
You know what that means?
Even he could not lift me using this method, and
even then, he'd never be able to lift himself because
this dude weighs 186 kilograms which means that he'd need over
2,149 newtons of force to lift himself this way.
That's over 5,000 pounds!!
We're talking about the weight of cars here!
This all happens because the lever of Getting Over It is an
inefficient as a lever.
Instead of lengthening the distance forces applied,
it actually shortens it.
Since the fulcrum force and load lifted are so freaking close to one another
and move over a comparatively short distance.
This isn't a lever! It's an anti-lever!
Nobody, nobody can lift themselves this way
because it will always require more force than the person can actually
conceivably output in order to pull it off!
That's not even taking into account the freaking cauldron!
Heck, in order to get it to work even on a small scale,
I had to use an actually efficient lever to apply the needed forces.
Because, otherwise, I was probably gonna break my
own freaking bones from the huge pascal forces being applied over
such small surface areas.
Yeah, enjoy those 810,000 freaking pascals being
applied to your hand bones, Deisel.
I can practically hear your bones snapping as you try to lift yourself up.
Let alone from the near certain death you'd totally be experiencing
from falling several feet with your legs crumpled up inside.
What is that? A cast iron cauldron?!
Those legs are broken!
This game! This freaking game!!
(yells)
Hours of my life I'll never get back
proving the nonsense of this stuff!
Think I'm wrong? Then, prove me wrong!!
Lift yourself this way, Bennett Foddy, and I will personally apologize.
The game's still fun, though.
Sincerely, Austin.
Hey, thank you very much for watching my episode on Getting Over It.
A weird choice.
The physics of it were too fascinating and too fun
and also headache-inducing but also really a lot of fun
to work out.
Especially my little experiment there.
Subscribe to The Game Theorists,
and have a Happy New Year, mother truckers!
See, I didn't actually swear there, YouTube.
I said, "mother truckers".
'Cause, it's... uhm... truckers
who are parents.
They drive.
Alright, I'ma go now.
{Subtitles by: Joshua Paul Maninggo, Isabella Verdini}