The Contact Question

[Janikka]

I saw an NHL 19 video from gzell60 which demonstrated a hockey stick going through an opponent's leg during a poke check. Last night, as I was playing EASHL as goalie, I had a puck rammed through my stick and into the net. I reviewed the replay multiple times, and sure enough: the puck found its way through my stick, a supposedly solid object in the context of the video game.

But what if we, the players, have it all wrong?

A few years ago, EA hired a physicist to help out with their puck physics for NHL 15. A Google search revealed the man to be one Michele Petteni. I don't know about you guys, but he seems qualified enough to me. It's probably safe to assume he knew what he was doing. I found no evidence that he's still part of the NHL team, however. In fact, it seems as though NHL 15 was both his video game debut and swan song. Maybe he didn't find the work rewarding enough. Maybe he felt as cheated and disappointed as the rest of us did when we found out NHL 15 was to omit a lot of the goodies such as EASHL. I mean, who would want to do all those calculations for nothing but HUT and a drop-in mode tacked on as damage control? Whatever the case, I would assume his work, or at least some of it, from that time has carried all the way over to NHL 19.

What prevents an object from passing through another? You'd have to be pretty dense not to know the answer to that one. Density is a measure of the mass of an object relative to its volume. So if an object is small but has high mass, said object is very dense. When two objects meet that are both adequately dense, they will be unable to pass through each other. The air that we breathe is pretty sparse. We are able to cut through it because our bodies are far denser than air. Air is still dense enough to offer us some resistance, of course, which is one of the things hindering our ability to move fast.

In real hockey you won't see sticks going through legs, or pucks penetrating goalies' sticks. All of those objects are too dense for that to happen. But as we've seen, it's not impossible in NHL 19.

What if it's all by design?

There's been plenty of talk on EA's NHL forums about incidental contact. The developers have written that they've tested full-fledged incidental contact and it didn't work too well. It bogged the game down rather than helped it, and the game got less fun.

Now, you would assume that to not apply to such instances as on gzell's video or in my EASHL game last night. But I have a theory. No, a hypothesis. EA may be ahead of the curve. Maybe they're not only thinking outside the box, but they've taken the box and they've thrown it away. Because when you watch that stick go through that leg, or that puck vanish into that stick only to come out from the other end, one thing feels certain: there truly is no box.

Or maybe Michele Petteni, bless his heart, was informed his services would not be needed beyond NHL 15 and decided to do a number on our friends at EA as a glorious last stand in the world of video game development. All we know is this: when you launch NHL, you'd do well to leave your conceptions of reality at the door. Because when it comes to reality, EA has a brand of its own.