Of Meez and Miis

As you can see from the upper left corner of my blog, I now have a Meez. She's kind of boring at the moment, I couldn't really find any realistic animations that looked good. Also, I'm surprised at how dull my Meez looks in comparison to some of my coworkers'. There are bald ones, disco dancing ones, ones who live in exotic locales, etc, and mine just looks as close to me as I could approximate, standing in (what else?) a library.

I wish that you could be more detailed with your Meez. If I could make her look closer to my actual weight range, I would. Some people were suprised I even put glasses on my little avatar, thinking that I would take this opportunity to make it my perfect version of myself. But I like these little things, skull shoes and glasses, that make it seem more like me and less like an anonymous big-eyed caricature.

I think I prefer the Nintendo Wii avatars, the Miis. Miis can be customized a lot more, with features that can be raised, lowered, made bigger or smaller, to the point where you can make a grotesque figure (like Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars) or even a mysterious blank-faced one. Miis can be made tall, short, thin, or fat. Miis also have the advantage of being used as players in various Wii games, as well as being tradeable with other users. And, unlike Meez, Miis have some degree of AI autonomy, walking freely around your Mii plaza and interacting with each other in Sims-like ways.

I think that Meez would be better if they were much more customizable. And how cool would it be if the moods were utilized in a more perceptive way? Say, if you tagged the most recent entry in your blog with "amazed," and your Meez looked amazed? It would be more like a LiveJournal emoticon, which changes dynamically with the mood tags entered on posts. I just think it would liven up the corner of my blog if she had more personality, but I don't want her jumping up and down all the time, either. I just want a little AI to give her some interesting aspects.