Gib (video Gaming) - Use in Games

Use in Games

Gibs feature prominently in many shooter games where gameplay generally focuses on killing large numbers of enemies. One of the first games in which gibs appeared was Smash TV (1990), although they were also a feature of the pioneering first-person shooter Doom (1993) and have been a mainstay of gaming titles ever since.

The use of "gib" is reserved for instances when a game character has been killed with such force that their body is reduced to a slurry of flesh and blood. In some games, the resulting gibs disappear after a short period to improve game performance by decreasing the number of objects that the game engine must render.

As well as describing the fragments as gibs, the word may be used as a verb, and killing a game character in this manner is to "gib" them. "Gib", and the related term "frag", are most commonly used in multiplayer deathmatches, where human player characters primarily kill one another rather than non-player characters. Introduced first in Quake, some games feature an Instagib gameplay mod or mutator in which a hit on an opponent results in instantaneous "gibbing". When a "gibbing" happens in the past tense it is known as being "gibbed" (e.g., "He got gibbed!").

There has been a decline of the use of simple gibs in games due to the development of ragdoll physics, which is better able to represent the effects of high-powered attacks. Many modern games that retain gibbing use dynamic ragdolls that can separate bodies into gibs that the physics system can then control. Some games even include jointed limbs as gibs to add to the dynamic effect of gibbing.