Video games have shown that we can control pretty darn well characters in virtual worlds where we have not experienced their physics. We just look at a 2D monitor and using a joystick/keyboard we manage to figure it out.
a game has very limited physics. like the buttons you press are pre-tuned to perform certain actions and you arent dealing with continuous nearly infinite possibilities with large ranges of motion, pressure, speed etc. like think about how difficult the game QWOP is because you mostly just have visual feedback
I beg to disagree. I got introduced to brand new (to me) physics of flying airplanes by MS flight simulator. None of the rules I knew in real life applied (gravity matters only sometimes, height can be traded for speed etc). Yet learned how to fly.
And when I took real classes in a real Cessna, this experience was transferable (aka the flying model I had in my brain was very similar to the one I experienced with my full body in the cockpit).
Yeah but we already have a conception of what physics should be prior to that that helps us enormously. It's not like game designers are coming up with stuff that intentionally breaks our naïve physics.
I mean they do but we often have generalized (to some degree) world models. So when they do things like change gravity, flip things upside down, or even more egregious changes we can adapt. Because we have contractual counterfactual models. But yeah, they could change things so much that you'd really have to relearn and that could be very very difficult if not impossible (I wonder if anyone has created a playable game with a physics that's impossible for humans to learn, at least without "pen and paper". I think you could do this by putting the game in higher dimensions.)