Ragdoll
Physics-driven character animation in which a limp body is simulated as linked rigid bodies rather than played from a canned clip.
When a figure dies or is knocked out, the hand-made animation is swapped for a simulation: the skeleton's bones become rigid bodies joined by constraints that limit how they may twist, and gravity does the rest. The result reacts to terrain, stairs and gunfire in a way no pre-recorded clip can, at the price of occasionally looking unintentionally comic.
The technique had its notorious debut in Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998), where the flailing limbs became a joke in their own right. Hitman: Codename 47 (2000) made it convincing using Verlet integration, and after Halo (2001) it became standard. Modern games blend ragdoll with skeletal animation into hybrids like "active ragdoll", where the muscles still push back.