During the NXE beta, someone sent a message to my Xbox. I didn’t recognize the handle, but he apparently knew me. “Your avatar looks so much like you!” he wrote. I frowned. “I hate my avatar,” I wrote back curtly. Then I clarified: “The hair is all wrong.”

He wrote back, confessing he hated his own NXE avatar. You know, the hair.

Later, at a Thanksgiving dinner among friends, I complimented someone on his NXE avatar. “I liked mine,” he agreed. “But yours was incredible.”

Was it? I wondered aloud. “I haven’t worn my hair that way in a year,” I reminded him. He seemed really startled, slowly realizing that I was right. I do not have short, shaggy hair. Not anymore.

The art of avatar creation is, at times, the same as the art of caricature. It could be said, too, that caricature is the equivalent and perfect polar opposite of vanity, that willful misrepresentation of yourself as someone more attractive than you really are (see also: Myspace angles). Caricature is here defined as not only an exaggeration, but as a “grotesque imitation or misrepresentation.” And because caricature is a deliberate misrepresentation, in a perfect parallel with the art of vanity, it willfully contradicts reality. Your identity on the Internet, as in the workplace and in virtual worlds, is probably a work of willful caricature.

This is a little bit uncomfortable for me, but for the purposes of objectivity, here is a neutral photograph of my face today, straight-on and with very little makeup. I’m giving you a little Mona Lisa smile, too, since emotiveness would necessitate constriction of my facial muscles: this is to say, smiling broadly would actually change the shape of my face.

So here is my fat, unapologetic face. I know this is uncomfortable, but examine it.

I have suspiciously beady eyes. They are framed with glasses (an accessory since third grade) and a full eyebrow, with a sharply defined arch, that sits hereditarily low on the browbone (I call that “80s brow,” and I was mocked incessantly for them in daycare). I have an arguably smallish mouth with a much fuller lower lip. I hate my nose. It is small, with a peculiarly broad bridge, so that it forms a perfect triangle—like what a scarecrow or a Tarutaru might wear on its face. In profile, my nose also has a Roman bridge, so that it becomes almost beaklike despite its flatness. My facial features are all pushed toward the center of my face, so that I have a fivehead—which I attempted, in childhood, to conceal with bangs—and a generous chin, whose size was only pointed out to me during my freshman year of college. I have a squared-off jaw: that, a friend pointed out to me in junior high. In this photo, you cannot see that my two front teeth are at least twice the size of my other teeth. That’s right—I have bunny teeth. Braces in junior high were meant to correct my overbite, albeit with dubious results.

Here is something that might eventually become important: In high school drama competitions, the judges used to write in the margins of their critique ballots, “long hair glasses.” It was shorthand so that they could better remember me minutes later when they would score all the teenaged competitors against one another. In response, I cut my hair short, “so they can see my face better,” I explained to my weeping mother. Genuinely, though, I had my hair shorn so my appearance could become distinctive. I wore my hair short for ten years. Now it is long again: laziness. Recently, I gave myself bangs. Whoops.

If vanity is only superficial insecurity, it follows that my intimate knowledge of my own face is culled from ungentle remarks from childhood friends. I defy you to know your own face so well without having first been a nerd.

Xbox 360: NXE avatar

Here is my NXE avatar. After a truly weak attempt at giving myself long hair, I elected to use a caricature version of my hair from, say, a year in the past. I have already misrepresented myself.

But game avatars trade on our sense of vanity to compensate for the innate grotesqueness of caricature: this avatar is, in fact, only one slider-notch shy of the fattest an Xbox caricature can become. Incredible.

Except for the deliberate discrepancy in hairstyle, which does feel disingenuous, I am pretty much reconciled with this avatar. After all, NXE let me create a character with beady eyes, glasses (my most salient characteristic!), a squared jaw, a beaklike schnozz, and dark, arched eyebrows. There was even a preset, thin-lipped mouth with bunny teeth, so I totally lucked out there.

But on the whole, I’m not sure this avatar is a success. If every hairstyle, or every notch on the slider, feels like a lie, I will never be completely comfortable in my decision to represent myself this way.

Nintendo Wii: Mii avatar

This is my original Mii (and, uh, sorry about my CRT’s moiré effect). It’s hard for me to discuss it in a perfectly objective way because, in 2006, that hair was so totally accurate. This Mii is essentially a comfortable old shoe.

The Mii creator omits necks, so for a semi- neckless wonder like me, my Mii is fine, but for you with swanlike necks, the Mii will never capture your body’s distinctive sort of grace.

The Nintendo Wii’s avatar creator is unique to most avatar creation software in that it allows you to ‘place’ the facial features. Given this, I have moved my nose to the center of my face, and for proportion, I moved the eyes as close to the nose as I could without making them weirdly convergent. The chinniness doesn’t quite overstep into Evil Dead territory. All in all, this is a pretty good caricature, I think.

But I don’t mean ‘caricature’ in its truest sense, because my facial features have been pleasantly transformed into something more endearing and kawaii. Since the Wii’s avatar creation tool goes well beyond any mere Potato-head software, it has more potential for caricature, but in a way that also seems to account for—ah!—human vanity.

With this point made, I will let you in on another little secret: My sliders are set toward what is very nearly the shortest and stumpiest a Mii avatar can be. But I tweaked and pinched at those sliders for a very long time. Because of that seemingly more refined control of height and girth, this avatar feels, to me, more sincere. Like less of a lie.

And therein lies the fib! For Mii avatars can convey utter slimness, but they are incapable of conveying fatness. The Mii character itself aesthetically stresses that by which we define ourselves—the human face—and deemphasizes the body. So the face can be caricatured, but the body cannot. And where vanity is involved, we want the distortion of true caricature to be tempered by a more encouraging conceit. The Mii avatar, it would seem, accomplishes both.

90s avatars

Here is my Shadow of Yserbius avatar from ImagiNation (or, as it was known in its earliest days, The Sierra Network). Because Shadow of Yserbius is an MMORPG from 1992, its character creation software is very limited. So if you don’t use a fantastical character default, you might as well go for broke, right? I did.

Scott Sharkey loves this avatar so much, he created a City of Heroes avatar based on her. (Incidentally, other playable avatars of Sharkey’s include Inside-Out Girl. Yikes.)

I include this avatar simply because its facelessness, its distinct lack of character, is kind of what does it for me. Its lack of identity makes it something of a counterargument to “caricature” and “vanity” both—it is a grotesque misrepresentation of nothing at all, but in the absolute extreme.

Next to a an actual INN avatar (here’s mine!), the Shadow of Yserbius avatar is comparatively distinctive, though. It makes my online character into a memorable icon, and isn’t that what avatars are really supposed to do? In contrast, my pigtailed pixel-portrait conveys little about me—except, I suppose, my apparent inability to feel. In short, the faceless avatar is inexplicably able to convey what the other cannot: any personality whatsoever.

And that’s fine. But I want my avatar to do more than just ‘have personality’ and ‘not wear a shirt.’ I need an avatar that is both recognizable and relatable, creating a virtual someone with whom other citizens or players will want to engage. I want to carefully simplify my own visage into a stark, memorable icon.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at avatar creation through the lens of cartooning in Avatars, part II of III.

Absolutely stunning. It definitely took artist Chris Hooton longer to make this toy than to play through Dead Space.

Here’s the real kicker, though: what’s under all those layers of paint and epoxy? Why, according to Hooton himself, one of these.

• The Other Castle – Custom Dead Space Action Figure

But a quick google of “8-Bit Jesus” brought me to this CafePress store, heralding the apocalypse. Was it a joke? I had to find out.

The 8-Bit Jesus homepage clarifies:

These charming, respectful images are the ultimate attire for anyone who loves classic video games. 8-Bit Jesus is distinctive, but not preachy. Irony-compatible, too, if that’s your thing!

So there you have it. They’re earnest, but atheists officially have the makers’ permission to think they’re cool too.

Shirt designs include Godtris, Sign of the Cross Combo (up, down, left, right), and—this is kind of my favorite—Jesus Saves.

Right? It’s kind of Castlevania-ey. Jesus is all, “You don’t belong in this world!” And Satan’s all, “What is man?” Beautiful, beautiful.

• 8-Bit Jesus: Christian Gamer Shirts and More

And I had never seen the box art for the two games side-by-side before. “Oh my God!” I shouted. I presented both boxes to my friend. “Just look at them—it’s the same cover!”

“How could a Christmas shopper tell these two games apart?” I continued. I named the similarities aloud: on each, there stands a hero, totally kitted out, wielding an enormous gun, set against a post-apocalyptic futurescape with a big, fiery sky, maybe with some alien architecture or a spaceship just along the horizon.

“If it’s so easy,” I concluded, “I think I have a real future in box art.”

I’m not being snide here. So, for your consideration, my attempts to punch up a couple game franchises for their eventual blockbuster releases:

I tried counting the ways I could get into trouble with this post, and I got nervous. So here are some due attributions: cosplayer, arm cannon (sorry), Dr Wily’s castle, stars tutorial, Arizona, robot, zeppelin, steamgun/forearm, sweet-faced man (sorry), Victorian man, Victorian boy, France.

Turns out mom posts videos of little Capucine to Vimeo with fair frequency, each one subtitled in English. Below, my new favorite child plays WiiFit for the first time with adorable exuberance.

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• Vimeo – Wii-fit! Woo-hoo!

In the short interim before resumption, here is a video, embedded below, that popped up in my YouTube subscriptions the day before yesterday. It heralds what is sure to be the winter season’s hottest fad, the PES Fireplace Screensaver.

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P.S. Still here? Perhaps you are wondering how PES correlates with videogames? This is how.

• Technophobia: 7 (or 10?) Horror Movies for Gamers
• This Friday’s episode of ‘Ghost Whisperer’ is going to be awesome

• Lovecraftian, stereoscopic horror for the Virtual Boy
• How to save survival horror
• Translating Siren for an American audience

• LTTP: Pac-Man Pumpkins
• Day of the Tentacle tentacle cookies
• World of Warcraft costumes

Happy Halloween!

• Instructables – Pac-Man Pumpkins (via)

Here are ten (?!) horror movies for gamers. Thanks to the combined efforts of reader comments and my own loathsome late-night cable TV habit, catalogued below are, count ‘em, ten—not seven—horrific parables about videogames and those who have the misfortune to play them.

Note: To everyone who linked to TV episodes, those were also great.

These movies are, almost uniformly and without rival, the absolute shittiest the horror genre has to offer. Enjoy.

How to Make a Monster, 2001

A made-for-TV movie based, however loosely, on the 1958 horror flick of the same name. In it, a team of game developers are pulling all-nighters, attempting to finish their next survival horror title. But when lightning strikes an AI chip…

Yeah, I can’t really recommend this movie. At all.

Verdict: No.

“Bishop of Battle,” Nightmares, 1983

Emilio Estevez stars as a teenaged arcade rat whose game obsession results in inevitable, supernatural comeuppance. This is pretty much the greatest, most archetypical videogame horror story ever written, set in that remote era back when Berzerk could kill a man.

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Verdict: Perfection, crammed into 26 perfect minutes.

Stay Alive, 2006

For a movie that nobody watched, Stay Alive is weirdly watchable. And although the movie title is supposed to sound ominous, I’ve always been reminded instead of a popular disco tune.

Anyway, the plot. A bunch of twentysomethings get a preview copy of a PS2 game. Then they start dying. Honestly? I remember being surprised by how much I liked the cinematographer’s use of color.

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Verdict: It isn’t Shakespeare, but it might be free on cable.

St. John’s Wort (Otogiriso), 2001

A videogame artist (J-horror staple Megumi Okina) and her producer decide, inexplicably, to explore a creepy old mansion. The plot unfolds like a survival horror adventure game—think Silent Hill or Fatal Frame—but without the scares.

In short, it’s the Japanese version of Stay Alive.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Verdict: A stylized clunker with a weird, tacked-on twist ending, but one that I own on DVD anyway.

Brainscan, 1994

Recommended by Chris Person, SpatulaOfDoom

“The ultimate experience in interactive terror!”

Just when you thought it was safe for CD-ROM gaming to finally take off, Eddie Furlong and his post-grunge bowl-cut go on a murder spree from inside the game. And this was well before anyone ever thought to call videogames “murder simulators”!

My favorite part of the trailer is when the puddle of computer-generated blood pools into the shape of a compact disc.

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Verdict: Rad.

Ghost in the Machine, 1993

Recommended by SpatulaOfDoom, carpboy

“And then there’s the movie Ghost in the Machine, once again from the the early 90’s, and starring Karen Allen. Brainscan and Ghost in the Machine are at least watchable.” —SpatulaOfDoom

I just realized this entry isn’t technically about gaming, but because of its thematic strength I’ll give it a pass.

Verdict: Thanks to its comparatively high recommendations, this might be one to add to the ol’ Netflix queue.

Arcade, 1993

Recommended by SpatulaOfDoom

“There was a movie in the early 90’s called Arcade. It starred A Christmas Story’s Peter Billingsley.

“Arcade looks about as childish as Spy Kids [3-D], but it did have enough violence and language to earn an R rating. It’s an awful fucking movie nonetheless. David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, Batman Begins) wrote the abomination.” —SpatulaOfDoom

In spite of Spatula’s derision, this movie trailer is, for me, pretty effective—probably because I am still infatuated with the VR machine they had in the mall movie theater in 1993.

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Verdict: Peter Billingsley…!

HALLOWEEN BONUS: Thanks to Zort in the comments, as well as three belated recommendations from Chris Person, I am adding three more movies to the list—bringing the list from its initial seven to a nice, round TEN.

Which brings me to a brief editorial note: in our collective strain to think of ten whole movies, the genre definition of ‘horror,’ at this juncture, becomes rather lenient. Does sci-fi/dark fantasy/suspense/action/thriller count as Halloween horror? Sure!

eXistenZ, 1999

Recommended by Zort and Chris Person

Does eXistenZ count as straight-up horror? It sure counts as bizarre.

I actually don’t remember this movie very well, but here’s what I can type from memory: Jude Law is in it. Christopher Eccleston is in it. Cronenberg directed it. And, uh, to play the game inside the collective dream, they put their hands into an alien vagina. That’s how it went, right?

Just seeing the trailer makes me want to go screaming to a psychotherapist.

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Verdict: Yep, it’s horrific.

The Dungeonmaster, 1985

Recommended by Chris Person

Notoriously bad fantasy flick with a cult following. In it, a computer gamer with muscular legs wakes up to find himself… See? You don’t even need me to continue.

In keeping with the established format of this blog, I should really post a trailer. But this pebble-in-the-rough is so obscure, it doesn’t seem to have a trailer. So, in lieu of a grainy VHS dub, here is crisp footage of a young man earnestly synopsizing The Dungeonmaster instead:

Verdict: Why do people love this movie so much? So you don’t have to.

Game Box 1.0, 2004

Recommended by Chris Person

Game Box 1.0 is styled after some of the earlier entries on this list, and it is a glorious mess. In it, a heroic game tester (the guy from “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”) fights to avenge his dead girlfriend (the girl from “Boy Meets World”). Um. Here’s a trailer.

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Verdict: Brain Scan 2.0.

There you have it: seven cautionary tales for gamers and three honorable mentions, each a story about the game becoming real; every one, a misguided masterpiece.

If you think of any more (and I’ll be pretty annoyed if you do), leave ‘em in the comments.

Granted, it’s already out. You can download the ROM (edit: no, no, download this one) and play it right now in a 2600 emulator like Stella. A warning: it’s tough.

Lead is a music shmup from programmer Simone Serra, designed for the Atari 2600. It boasts unforgiving gameplay and a catchy ‘glitch’ soundtrack.

As for the game’s music mechanics, freelancer/archivist/programming hobbyist Jess Ragan says, “Simone [Serra] has done what Tetsuya Mizuguchi could not: create a ‘synes-static’ shooter that is not entirely dependent on pretty graphics and a pretentious art direction.” His review of an earlier build of Lead, below:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

A little over a week ago, AtariAge announced the winner of the Lead Label Contest. The game will ship—with pretty labels on real Atari carts, as God intended!—this December.

• Retro Thing – Retrospective(?): Lead 16k for the Atari 2600

You guys. This is maybe more amazing than the Tatooine bento.

Apparently, this work of Incredible Genius was made for Derek Lieu by his girlfriend. Sheez, nice lady. Lieu posted more detailed photographs, along with plenty of annotations, on his Flickr, here. (The Yoshi egg is an actual quail egg!)

• Tiny Cartridge – Super Smash Bros Brawl bento lunches

Poorhouse, meet my total lack of resolve. Because here they are, folks: ridiculously articulated figures from the Gyakuten Saiban series (including Ema Skye and Trucy, both from Apollo Justice).

Ema is my favorite. Forensic science is rad, and look how detailed her satchel is.

I can’t wait to get my hands on these, but no word yet on when, where, or how.

• Fruit Juicy – Tokyo Game Show 2008: Phoenix Wright Action Figures. (via)

Reasons to watch episodes of Ghost Whisperer with any interest whatsoever: Jay Mohr is good; there’s an amazing episode with Nikki Cox; I’m trying to think of one more reason to edit in, but I can’t. And for the first couple seasons, every scene was shot strategically so that Hewitt’s hips were never visible (there’s a drinking game in there somewhere).

But set your Tivos for this Friday’s October 17 episode, “Ghost in the Machine”!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

In reading various synopses, I have gleaned that a “ghost” is luring girls to a gaming “social networking website”. The trouble all starts when the main character checks out “Virtual Life” on the computer and a ghost “avatar” flies out of the monitor. Later, during another visit to “Virtual Life,” the main character’s “avatar” gets into a physical fight with the ghost’s “avatar.” The main character begins her investigation, and she meets someone named Ned on “Virtual Life” to “play DDR.”

I cannot wait for this episode. I especially like the supernaturally-tinged Dateline plot, designed to confirm everything my mom believes about the internet. It all reminds me of the time I begged my friend, whose own mom was the head writer for a popular daytime soap opera, to tell someone to rewrite a script that boasted a “hacking into an email” “using a Virus” subplot.

If you enjoy “Ghost in the Machine,” you might also like other movies with similar horror themes of “help! The game is too real!” I recommend How to Make a Monster, Stay Alive, and St. John’s Wort, all of which are piss-poor. Then, of course, there’s always Emilio Estevez’s fine turn in the “Bishop of Battle” segment in 1983’s Nightmares.

Any other Halloween suggestions?

I thought we struck a deal, here, you guys. I’d periodically mention that Defcon is the greatest game ever made, and then when the time came, we’d all pick up copies of Multiwinia. Right? So why aren’t you playing Multiwinia?

Perhaps you are waiting for Darwinia+ to be released for XBLA later this year (edit: sometime next year)? Understandable! Perhaps you don’t have a PC to play Multiwinia on? I’m right there with you, cowboy. But maybe—no offense—you didn’t know the game had come out?

Kieron over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun chanced upon Chris Delay’s lengthy missive over at the Introversion forums. A big part of the problem, Delay notes, is a profound lack of coverage:

It’s been three weeks since we launched Multiwinia, and today Metacritic shows four reviews (the minimum required for a metacritic average) for the first time since game launch. By comparison, Defcon had nearly thirty metacritic reviews within a week of launch. Of the reviews we have arranged with websites and magazines, less than 20% of them have been published at this time. One british games magazine has declined to review Multiwinia at all—ever.

With that said, I made this hip and attention-getting banner. Do with it as you will.

The Multiwinia demo is available as a free PC download, here. Tell your friends!

• Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Introversion Speak Out: Play Our Bloody Demo
• Introversion Forums – Save Multiwinia

The subjects of chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and peace offer three games each. There is also one game currently listed under “economics,” intended to teach the fundamentals of national and international trade. In playing the Lord of the Flies game, I realized that—despite its being my favorite allegory when I was 14—I was only able to match the character Piggy to his eyeglasses. Sigh.

• Nobelprize.org – Educational Games: Recommended Games