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What are gibs? A brief history.

In most first-person shooter games, if you attack with great force, enemies will fall into pieces. These are called gibs, and have been used in computer games for a "realistic" death effect for many years. Due to technological constraints, the effect was in fact more complex – once the enemy got killed by the player, its "lifelike" model disappeared, and was immediately substituted by a bunch of fragments that fell to the ground. These fragments weren't part of the original enemy, but separate gib models conceived specifically to express mutilation. Glossed over with special effects, this process did approximate exploding a body, but was in fact just a replacement – in video games, there is no continuity between life and death.
The above became less true with increased adoption of simulated ragdoll physics, forerun by Trespasser in 1997. There, ragdoll physics prompted the developer to abandon modelling gibs, in favour of a mechanic wherein a killed dinosaur collapsed to the ground quite naturally. Such a depiction of death was less brutal, similarly realistic, and can be said to resemble how many parents explain death to children – "the dinosaurs are sleeping". The gibs era can be considered over with the introduction of a synthesis, [[citation needed], the game which allowed players to chop off any part of an enemy's body, thus reestablishing the link between life and death we know from physical existence.

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