Overview
Full body awareness is a feature of first-person games in which players are able to see their entire body. This gives the player a better sense of immersion, as they can see their actual body and any arm and leg movement from a first-person perspective. While this might seem like an obvious or practical feature, many older games would hide the player's actual body from view, opting to use a separate set of "first-person" models for the player's perspective instead (Quake II, for example). While full body awareness could be considered a gimmick under certain circumstances, games like Mirror's Edge utilize it to give the player a more connected experience.
Older games featuring full body awareness often used lower quality models in order to maintain a respectable frame rate, resulting in simplistic player and weapon models. As technology improves, players are just as likely to see high-quality models and textures in the first-person perspective as they would be from any other perspective.
First-person shooters have been ridiculed at times for not utilizing full body awareness, creating an experience where the player appears to be nothing but a set of arms and a floating gun. While many modern FPS games are beginning to show the player's full body, some games still use the "floating gun" disconnect, to create higher-quality weapon models and animations without sacrificing performance.
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