Updated 23 May, 2012, 6:39 pm IST

The Advent of Full Body Awareness in Gaming

01 Sep, 2009, 2:47 pm IST | by Nikhil Singh

We take a look at FBA, how it was born, and where it went wrong

When first person shooters were a new breed, the gaming community was too blindsided with excitement to notice that some of their favorite protagonists were physically little more than a cube with a camera and a gun sprite mounted on it. To make their games a little immersive, developers would just add a slight head-bob effect and cheat by using a mug-shot of the character on the heads-up-display (HUD) which would react to the actions of the player (like in Doom). The both of these together would conjure an illusion of you being in the driver's seat of an actual human, rather than a cube with a gun, since, you know, cubes with guns don't kill stuff, people do!

Everyone's favorite cube-with-a-gun!

A short while later the illusion wore out, people realized that if they look down in real-life they see legs and not pixelated floor textures. "Where the F%$# are my legs!", said the cube with a gun, and developers answered the call by giving them limbs. Full Body Awareness was born.
__STARTQUOTE__Full Body Awareness is the semblance of controlling a real-human being in first-person shooters, that's conjured by making a game characters' body perform actions and react to the game world just like a real human body would. It's an amalgamation of all such features that pivot around the player's awareness of his given body, with the intention of making gameplay more immersive.__ENDQUOTE__One of the first games that had respectable FBA (Full Body Awareness) was Trespasser: Jurassic Park. You played the role of 'Anne' who crash lands on the Jurassic Park island, just to find tonnes of melee weapons to swing at and kill dinosaurs. You could see her arms since the viewpoint wasn't fixed onto the torso. You could see most parts of her body, including ample cleavage every time you looked down. I wonder why they'd block the view below her using cleavage... may be she had hideous feet. Regardless, the game's 'ample bosom Anne' and her Full Booby... err I mean Full Body Awareness went unappreciated thanks to mediocre gameplay and more bugs than dinosaurs.

Full booby awareness

Fast-forward to 2005 - F.E.A.R. was released, one of the best examples of how well implemented FBA can make a game scale to the zenith of immersion. While there were quite a few games like Thief: Deadly Shadows and Halo 2 that made mediocre progress, it was F.E.A.R. that became the industry standard for brilliant FBA. To break it down, F.E.A.R. had some of the best melee attacks any first-person shooter has had before it, which included a sliding kick and a scissor kick that looked incredibly cool when executed. What made the FBA that much more believable is the way the camera was managed during these attacks - it would jerk back a second as you'd coil the limb in anticipation, and then whiplash to follow through with the attack, emulating reality accurately. What most developers don't understand is that the animation of the character's camera/viewpoint, is as important as the actual character animation for FBA to be pulled off well. In the end, if one's without the other it just doesn't work.

Today, FBA has become a standard feature in most high budget shooters. Last year's Mirror's Edge did it really well - you'd jump from one roof-top to another as 'Faith' would scale the longest jump like a little hop. The FBA was near-perfect and you'd actually feel like you're in her shoes. In spite of such advances in technology, games still use the age-old mechanics such as head-bobbing to add to the immersion. They over-do it sometimes, and the result can be quite unsettling; case in point - the new Wolfenstein game where the player's head-bobs like he's a gorilla running around, swaying his head.

To sum up, Full Body Awareness is perfected only when developers find a balance between all the variables that go into making character animation, as well as animation of the camera/viewpoint believable. Over-do any one of them, and the balance is thrown off, severely wounding immersion.