Microsoft Seeks to Kill the Fun of Avatars
by Dillon Andrews - December 21, 2009
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If you’re like Ve3tro staff Kevin Moser and I, you will know that we absolutely hate the Avatar system on the Xbox 360. Sure, we love making goofy, bizarre and outright strange looking creatures–but a replica of ourselves? No thank you, that’s not our thing. …Well it turns out Microsoft are looking to eliminate creativity with their newest patent.
Microsoft aims to eliminate the bizarre and force its players into using an avatar that looks like themselves in an effort to encourage users to do some exercise and to decrease the confusion of whether or not people actually look like their avatars. (Apparently people actually care?)
“An Avatar generator for a virtual environment reflects a physiological characteristic of the user, injecting a degree of reality into the capabilities or appearance.
“Thereby, many of the incentives of the real world are replicated in a virtual environment.
“Physiological data that reflect a degree of health of the real person can be linked to rewards of capabilities of a gaming Avatar, an amount of time budgeted to play, or a visible indication.
*Quotes taken from GamesIndustry.biz
So in other words kids, be pretty or don’t play on Xbox because a lot of people will laugh at you–and your virtual avatar. This may be the worst patent ever filed–if this is enforced, expect a lot of outraged gamers across the world.
