Last updated 15 September 2026
Educational content
The guides on Physics Arcade explain physics concepts for a general audience. They are written to build intuition — a feel for how relationships behave and what happens when you change one variable — not to serve as a textbook.
They are not peer reviewed. They deliberately simplify, and they are explicit about it. If you are studying physics formally, use these guides for intuition and your course material for everything else. Where the two disagree, your course material is correct.
Game physics is not a simulation
Please read this one
Physics Arcade games use simplified, tuned physics built for playability. They are not scientific simulations: forces, masses and timings are chosen because they feel good at 60 frames per second, not because they match measured values. Where a game departs from real-world behaviour in a way that matters, the game page says so.
Specifically, and without being exhaustive:
- Gravity values are arbitrary. Game gravity is measured in pixels per second squared and chosen so a fall feels right on screen. It is not 9.81 m/s².
- Restitution is treated as constant. In reality it falls as impact speed rises.
- Air resistance is simplified or absent. Most games use linear damping rather than true quadratic drag.
- Some values are physically impossible. Perfectly elastic walls and bumpers that return more energy than they receive both appear here, deliberately, because they make better games.
- Fluid and buoyancy behaviour is heavily flattened. The games that use it say so on the page and on screen.
Do not use a game on this site to check a physics homework answer. Use it to understand why the answer has the shape it does.
No professional advice
Nothing on this site constitutes professional, educational, engineering or safety advice. The structural reasoning in the balance and construction guides describes simplified two-dimensional game models and must not be applied to real structures.
External links
Guides link to educational resources from universities, NASA and platform documentation. Those organisations are independent of Physics Arcade, do not endorse this site, and are not responsible for anything published here. We link to them because they are good sources, not because of any relationship.
We check external links when a page is published, but the web changes. If a link is broken or now points somewhere unexpected, please tell us.
Availability and data
Games and content may change or be removed without notice. Scores, favourites and play history are stored only in your browser and cannot be recovered by us if they are lost.
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Accuracy and corrections
We aim for accuracy and correct confirmed errors promptly, noting substantive corrections on the page. See the fact-checking policy for the process, and the editorial policy for the standards we hold ourselves to.
Report anything you believe is wrong to editorial@physicsarcade.xyz.