The amazing generic avatar

Yesterday, Microsoft’s big Xbox 360 update, dubbed the New Xbox Experience (or informally the NXE) was released to the wide public after being hyped up for the better part of the second half of the year. It brings a host of improvements and new features that don’t need to be discussed here.

One of the biggest new features in the introduction of avatars, lovable cute little representations of ourselves. No longer the sole domain of Nintendo and their Miis, Microsoft saw fit to jump on that bandwagon with their own flavor of avatars. And its non-optional, one of the first things you’re prompted to do after you install NXE on your 360 is create at least one avatar representing yourself.

For the most part, the 360 avatars follow the fairly standard script created by Nintendo. Curiously enough, you’re not asked to choose a gender when representing your avatar, but you can choose from a small range of templates (evenly divided into male and female virtual representations) and then modify from there. The typical facial features like eyes, nose, hair, and ears can be altered. Going even farther then what Nintendo provides, you can play dress up with your avatar and choose from a fairly limited selection of clothing.

But that’s about as interesting as it gets. Even though Microsoft has had a full 2 years to copy Nintendo’s Mii interface and process, the NXE avatars don’t come anywhere near as close to the variety of things you can create with the Miis. Forget doing something like Zoidberg or Vulcans here, you’ll be lucky enough to get something that moderately resembles you. The facials features are relatively limited, there’s not a large number of different body parts to use and even more curiously you have no control over their placement and size. So if you have a huge forehead or big nose, good luck accurately trying to replicate that with your avatars. In the end they all resemble people who vaguely look like you which is a far cry from some of the more creative Miis out there.

The other design decision that hurts avatars is that their key differentiating factor, clothing, is severly hampered by Microsoft’s decision to make clothing purchasable on the Xbox Live stores. Clothing right now can’t be modified in any meaningful fashion, no choosing a t-shirt and then choosing the color or anything like that. It screams of “buy more clothes when they’re on sale!”.

But really, all this fuss may be over nothing. Avatars right now are almost entirely superfluous. A large part of the success of Miis comes from how tightly integrated they are into just about all of Nintendo’s casual and expanded audience lineup. Even in games where Miis aren’t necessarily used like Mario Kart you’ll find them littering the grandstands and roadsides. Right now, only a few games use avatars (most of them casual Xbox Live Arcade games). While we can expect Microsoft to heavily push avatar use in future titles, right now there’s not much need for them at all.


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