contextualFEELcanonical

Tune for the sensation, not physical accuracy

GDC-L1-FEEL-0007

Strong4/5

Statement

When realism and feel conflict, tune for the sensation you want the player to have, not for physical accuracy. The goal is a body that feels right to control — not a correct simulation.

Rationale

The player experiences the feeling of movement, never its equations (ties to DESIGN-0001: judge by the experience produced). Beloved control famously violates physics: platformer jumps use asymmetric gravity (rise slower, fall faster) that no real projectile obeys; characters accelerate to full speed in a frame or two; coyote time lets you jump from empty air. These "lies" exist because they feel better — controllable, snappy, fair. The whole discipline of game feel treats the sensation as the tunable target and physical plausibility as merely one input to it [S-swink-gamefeel] — which is why the craft of shaping physicality is literally named "tuning": you tune toward a sensation, not toward realism [S-pichlmair-johansen-survey].

Applies when

Any time simulated movement or physics is in service of how it feels to play — which is most action, platforming, and character control. The more the game is about the joy of moving, the more feel should win over accuracy.

Does not apply / Exceptions

Simulation is the point in sim genres — racing sims, flight sims, physics sandboxes, some sports — where fidelity to real behavior is the intended experience and "improving the feel" by faking physics would betray it. Realism can also be a deliberate feel target (deliberate heaviness, tank controls for tension). The principle is "serve the intended sensation," and sometimes the intended sensation is realism.

Implementation

Decide the target sensation first ("floaty and forgiving," "heavy and deliberate," "snappy and precise"), then tune numbers toward it and discard realism where it fights the target. Expose feel-critical values (accel, gravity up/down, max speed, friction, air control) as easily-iterated parameters and tune them by feel in playtest, not by physical derivation. Keep the simulated space internally consistent even when it's unrealistic, so the player can still build accurate intuitions.

Disagreement

Feel-first (arcade, platformer, action) vs. simulation-first (sim genres) is a real and legitimate split, but it is usually a genre choice rather than a live argument: both camps agree the rule is "serve the intended experience," and simply intend different experiences. Encoded here as contextual for that reason.

Notes

This is the physicality-layer counterpart to FEEL-0002/0003's control-layer guidance. Confidence 4: overwhelmingly true for action/arcade design, with the honest and large sim-genre exception keeping it contextual.

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