New Line Cinema, producers of the forthcoming Christmas blockbuster The Golden Compass (the first film adaptation of the His Dark Materials book trilogy by Philip Pullman), have added a neat new toy to the official movie website. Now, since we’re all over here working away on the official game of the movie, we thought it only right that we spend lots of work time playing around with it.

The clever device introduces site visitors to Pullman’s concept of a person’s soul being manifest as an animal - their daemon. The little heroine of The Golden Compass, Lyra, (usually) has an ermine buddy called Pan, for instance.

On the site, you’re asked a series of 20 questions about your own personality. At the end of the process you’re told what form your daemon would take, as well as its name.

But that’s not the really clever bit. Once you’ve created your daemon you’re given a piece of code that allows you to slot it onto your own blog / MySpace / website / bit-of-internet. Other people can then see your daemon and answer more questions about you, altering the look of your daemon if they don’t agree with your own answers.

See? Clever!

Dave and I have given it a go. Dave’s come up with a kick-ass snow leopard called Desra. I, on the other hand, seem to have produced a timid-looking rodent called Trina.

Trina, I think, would make a great mid-afternoon snack for a snow leopard. I’m afraid for my soul.

Go get your own daemon now at www.goldencompassmovie.com.

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so.addParam (”scale”, “noscale”);
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var so = new SWFObject(”http://goldencompassmovie.com/goldenCompass_blog.swf?id=70071″, “flash”, “450″, “400″, “8″, “#FFFFFF”);
so.addParam (”menu”, “false”);
so.addParam (”scale”, “noscale”);
so.addParam (”wmode”, “transparent”);
so.write(”flashItem2″);