We don’t think only with our minds. Our bodies think too. As psychologist Timothy Wilson shows in a book about what he calls “the adaptive unconscious”, our sensory systems monitor and filter information all by themselves, and then decide what to present to our conscious attention. Your muscles go through an intense high-speed choreography just to avoid bumping into someone in the street, without your having to deliberately perform all the separate twists and steps. Athletes and musicians deliberately train “muscle memory”, so that legs and fingers will work of their own accord in dizzyingly complex harmony. When I am writing, my fingers sometimes appear to construct sentences by themselves and my mind then decides whether it’s garbage or not. To mean anything in the real world, as certain robot-centric AI researchers already believe, intelligence must be embodied.

What does this mean for a videogame that attempts to situate us in an otherwordly space? I have written before in this column about the curious disembodiment in first-person games and the way this works against identification with your ficional character. You can see your hands holding an assault rifle, but look down and you don’t seem to have any feet, as though you are an unfortunate amputee sitting on an anti-gravity disc. Your field of vision might pop up and down in order to simulate footsteps, but this is as likely to make you feel queasy through motion sickness as to persuade you of real movement. Too often you feel like a mobile reticule, and high-speed FPSs such as Unreal Tournament essentially become cursor-wielding contests.

Now, gratifyingly, a game has come along that not only acknowledges this dissonance but goes a long way towards solving it. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is, to my mind, the first first-person adventure to have thought hard about issues of embodiment and character in the genre, and its subtle and intelligent engineering is a triumph. I cast a shadow that lurks before me in gloomy interiors, creeping up walls and along ceilings. I can swing my fists in front of my face, and if someone else hits me my head gets knocked to the side. I look down and - yes! - I have lower legs that seem to be in reliable contact with the floor.

But that’s not enough, of course, because Vin Diesel has gone to the trouble of recording his voice rôle for the game, in his inimitably excellent style of I’ve-just-woken-up-after-a-long-night’s-partying-and-I-haven’t-had-any-coffee-but-I-could-still-kill-you, and Mr Diesel (which let’s face it is a cooler name than Mr Unleaded) presumably wants his image in the game more consistently than in occasional cut-scenes. So we switch to third-person whenever we have to climb over crates or down ladders, operate door controls, or get a shot of nano-meds, and thus we get to see the superb likeness of our lovable big baldy very frequently. It’s a good commercial solution, but it’s also a brilliant gaming solution - because clambering over crates, or down ladders (or more usually falling down ladder shafts) is exactly the sort of thing that is hideously annoying to do in a first-person view. And it also brings us closer to a psychological identification with mirror-eyed vest dude. I never tire of seeing the little nano-med cut scene, and every time I do I still get a pleasurable wince out of seeing the needles plunging into Vin’s neck.

Okay, so wait a minute. I thought about writing “my neck” at the end of that last sentence, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do so. For one thing, I have a lot more hair than Vin. Perhaps the embodiment is not complete. In a way, I still consider the protagonist of the game to be “me” in the first-person view and “Vin” in the third-person. But it’s not so strictly compartmentalised. In fact, I find that each third-person sequence reminds me that - hey! - I’m Vin Diesel, and for the next few moments back in the first-person action I *am* Vin Diesel. Which is not to say that my hair falls out, but that some part of my mind faintly imagines Vin Diesel’s enormous shoulders and torso somewhere below my virtual point of view as I creep up behind someone and execute a vicious two-handed neck snap. And then the effect wears off and I’m just me again, until the next third-person sequence.

So for me, Riddick does not quite achieve total psychological consistency in its illusion of embodiment, but it’s important to note that even when I am “just me” during the game, I am a me who seems much more convincingly situated in the gameworld than is usual in the first-person genre, thanks to the sight of my forelimbs and shadow, which I am happy to accept as actually “mine”, since they are less immediately identifiable as belonging to Vin Diesel.

It’s a complex problem, this one of embodiment and situation in the virtual space, but it’s not just a matter of vertiginous psychological theorising. A breakthrough in the illusionistic mechanics of embodiment, as provided by Riddick, constitutes another advance for that slightly vague phenomenon we call “immersion”. In short, in Riddick, because for at least some of the time I am *really him*, I feel I am more *really there* - more than in Deus Ex, or Thief (which, in its third iteration, arguably glumly acknowledges the embodiment-versus-character problem by offering switchable first or third-person views, but does not find the kind of triumphant synthesis offered in Riddick), or even Halo. Helped by the superb bumpy, light-scattering textures, the pervasive aesthetics of rock, rust and grime, and the emphatic clanks and echoes of the sound design, the game offers about as close to the experience of being locked up in a maximum-security penitentiary on a distant planet as I ever really want to get.

Consider the fact, meanwhile, that a seamless experience of embodiment in the digital realm might in fact be exceedingly weird. Suppose some descendant of the EyeToy could subject you to a full-body scan, so that it would be *your* arms and your legs visible in first-person view, and *your* whole body and face in third-person. How would we react? Would we cognitively rebel against such a dramatic confrontation with ourselves? How would it feel to see our personal avatars bloodily maimed and killed? Embodiment is a seductive idea, but a potentially troubling one too.

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