When you go for a walk outside for whatever reason (at least I hope you do), you don't mind that it takes so many steps just to cross the road. You don't mind that it takes 20 minutes to walk across the campus to get to your next class (if you're a college student that is). You don't mind that it may take you five minutes or more just to walk to your car on your way home from work (if you have a job that you drive to). We percieve these trips to be "short".
Overly specific example that might not apply to you aside, what I'm getting at is how our sense of scale affects our tolerance of distance we travel and the time we take to do so.
In real life we tend to tolerate such distances and time to cover them. A given distance seems longer when it is inside your house than it is when it is out on your driveway. We often take this for granted and never give it a second thought.
However, put the same distance into a video game, and things start to fall apart.
The problem in a video game is that you're perception of time and distance is not as effected by scale as in real life. What would be considered a short trip in real life seems like a painfully long distance when put into a video game. On the flip side, a room in your house that seems big enough in real life will often seem too small if put into a video game.
In many games the developers will compensate in many different ways, like making indoor areas bigger, putting buildings closer together, or making the player faster or slower than a normal person. Sometimes this leads to rather hilarious results, such as how certain areas in World of Warcraft make you look like midgets in a land made for giants, or in Half-Life 1 where when you stop and think about it your default running speed often crazy fast in some of the more enclosed areas.
This starts to become obvious when you play a game for the first time that does not try to adjust these distances to make them more comfortable. For example, when many people play a tactical shooter like Rainbow Six 3 or Arma, they often feel that outdoors feel to big and indoor areas feel too small. It's easy to get used to distances being scaled for comfort that it can feel awkward when distances are scaled like real life. (reality is unrealistic!)
Have you had any unusual/funny/interesting experiences with exaggerations of scale and speed in a video game?
