system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: In videogames, why is it so difficult to program objects to not go through other objects?

For instance, characters going through the landscape, capes and other articles of clothing going through the character, etc.
gpt
It is a huge amount of math to calculate the actual shape of objects down to the polygons of their models. Instead game engines "cheat" by only calculating a simplistic model of the objects, where a character for example will have a single origin point and a "collision box" around it to prevent passing through walls or other obstacles. That way math can be done on a simple square or circle rather than hundreds of thousands of polygons defining a constantly changing 3D region of space.