One of the most immersive aspects of games is in having the world respond to your interactions with it. Moving a character with your keyboard or controller is expected, you’re directly influencing the action. But having that character bump into a table and knocking the lamp off onto the floor causing it to break and attract the guards attention in the next room is a secondary or even tertiary response to your direct input. This gives the world a greater sense of being alive and responsive.

Arguably the most entertaining of these secondary reactions is when things get destroyed. Explosions, collapsing bridges, and car crashes are all very exciting to watch within a game. Partially because these things can’t be experienced in real life without a large budget and many safety precautions but also that there is an amount of variance to each act of destruction that we can’t predict and want to watch over and over again in slow motion.