As a person who did a PhD in CFD, I must admit I never encountered the vorticity confinement method and curl-noise turbulence. I guess you learn something new every day! Also, in industrial CFD, where the Reynolds numbers are higher you'd never want something like counteracting artificial dissipation of the numerical method by trying to applying noise. In fact, quite often people want artificial dissipation to stabil…
That is exactly correct. That said, as something of a physics nerd (it was a big part of the EE curriculum in school) people often chuckled at me in the arcade pointing out things which were violating various principles of physics :-). And one of the fun things was listening to a translated interview with the physicist who worked on Mario World at Nintendo who stressed that while the physics of Mario's world were not the same as "real" physics, they were consistent and had rules just like real physics did, and how that was important for players to understand what they could and could not do in the game (and how they might solve a puzzle in the game).