Modern video games, especially in this day and age of the
MMORPG, are no less subject to this failing of
physics. Take
EverQuest for example: as one of the most popular games on the market, one would think that extra time and effort had been put in to making EQ a far superior game, but quite the opposite is evident only a few moments into playing the game.
EQ, while purporting to be a "realistic" first-person POV game, falls short in the physics department with walls that you can see through because your avatar is a different shape, nearly-sheer cliffs and trees that monsters can walk straight up, while players are (frustratingly) stuck at the bottom, and the ever-mysterious magically-sized equipment.
Of the major flaws, the equipment flaw actually has two sides. First, there is the magical-resizing effect: When a large person (such as a Human or Troll wields a weapon such as a longsword, it appears to be about three to four feet long. Hand that same weapon to a Pixie, and magically, it shrinks to a toothpick-sized six inches! Rather than deal with the logistics of differently-sized weapons, the EQ designers decided to simply scale weapons to match the size of the avatar.
The second interesting effect is the "bottomless sewing kit" effect. Everquest utilizes containers of varying sizes, from tiny wrist-pouches, to gigantic haversacks. Each container has a limitation to the size of object that can be contained within (containers cannot be nested, however), and in general, these make some amount of sense: small containers can only contain small items, large containers, large items, etc. It gets weird when dealing with tradeskill containers, however. Things like mixing bowls, spits, and the ever-popular sewing kit, are designed to allow players to put the items that are part of a specific recipe into them, and click a magic "combine" button which somehow simulates the actions of actually creating an object, in the hopes of succeeding (a random event, at best). Since some recipe items are of "giant" size (notably, animal pelts), these containers have to be able to hold giant-sized items. Unfortunately, the programmers didn't look far enough ahead to realize that players would happily abuse this by carrying around the much-lighter sewing kits (as opposed to heavy, bulky backpacks), since each sewing kit could hold up to eight gigantic items.
Ever wanted to stuff a halberd in your pants? In EverQuest, you can.