A2 5 Shrinking Suspicions: Why Mario Kart’s Shock Isn’t So Shocking

Abstract

In this paper, we look to investigate if the shrinking seen in Mario Kart Wii using the shock item is feasible. We find that the required energy to overcome the Coulomb repulsion force is within the range of 0.2 to 7 × 10¹² J, which is three orders of magnitude greater than the energy of an average lightning bolt. Therefore, we conclude that this is not a feasible method to shrink the characters in the game, suggesting that alternative mechanisms must be responsible for the observed phenomenon.