Examining a Game Character's Physical Presence

GameSetWatch is running a feature about the evolution of game characters' physical presence. In many games, you can look down and not see your feet, or pass right through other players or NPCs. Other games rely on a believable model that can animate and collide with its surroundings. Tom Cross examines some of those scenarios, and also games that raise the bar for having a physical presence, such as the new Alone in the Dark.
"Edward Carnby's body is a distinct factor in everything that the player does. Your inventory is carried inside Carnby's leather jacket. To use, drop, or combine items, you must open it wide and look down at your own chest. The healing mechanic, too, reinforces the oft-forgotten fact that you have a body. To heal yourself, you must look at the parts of your body (arms, leg, chest) that are wounded, and then spray them with first-aid liquid. Likewise, when you equip an item, Edward reaches for it, palming it and then switching back to the stock third or first person view."

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl.../09/06/1633234

sounds like a gimmick that artificially adds challenge

I'd be willing to try it out just once, several games have benefited with more primitive versions of this.

Alone in the Dark was rubbish! Actually, it was mostly really good, but the combat system was completely awful. Enemies had to be killed with fire, which was way too complicated and unsatisfying for me. I HATED IT! Trying to dispose of enemies was terrible. They'd just stay knocked out for five minutes, waiting for you to burn their corpses, and if you took too long to slooowly drag their bodies to fire or come up with a plan to use fire to kill them, they'd just get back up with full health.
BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THE AWFUL COMBAT SYSTEM IN ALONE IN THE DARK THAT FORCED ME TO NOT PLAY THE GAME.
I did think it was cool how the player got a first-person look at all of his stuff. I like characters dynamically interacting with things around them, too, like how in Grand Theft Auto 4 characters automatically put out their hands when near a moving car, with the hands actually contacting the car rather than just using a stock animation, or the way in which characters would switch between ragdolls and animations at any time, or even just have some parts turn into ragdolls while the rest of the body used animations.
For a while I've realized how fake everything is in video games for no reason. Some games finally use inventories visible on the character, usually just action games that have a limited type of items. Syphon Filter comes to mind, where the players' many guns and items appear all over his body. I also liked seeing RPGs that had the player's armor and other such items actually change the character's appearance.
Animations are also ridiculous. They use motion capture, but everything always looks to be in slow motion or exagerated. Feet don't seem to carry characters (which they technically don't). It's rare to see a running animation that looks realistic. In Call of Duty 4, sprinting looks realistic because the animations look well-done, but also the player's feet seem to carry him as he moves, rather than the player's feet simply moving as the player himself moves forward.
Sometimes a game will look realistic when everyone is moving around in an in-game cutscene, but at the end, everyone will stand up, get in position, and start using their standard animations, and they look really goofy with this weird, obvious transition.
I guess it's a little bit much to ask for a huge variety of realistic animations that move as quickly as real people do, but many games have had inventories appear on characters, so that's one sign of realism being possible in games.