The New Xbox Experience: Avatars

The core, though, is clothing. "You're going to be able to customise and personalise yourself, so we'd expect people to change their facial features once or twice - and that's on the studies we've seen of people who edit with the Mii," says Sutherland, "and what we wanted was a reason for people to come back in here, and the clothing is one example of that. What am I going to wear today?"

The answer is: pretty much anything you can imagine. There will be thousands of items available in a catalogue (handled by Microsoft, so we don't get to see it - but we'll anticipate an elegant solution, since the whole point of Xbox Experience is handling sizable volumes of data), and you can leaf through a few - including seasonal collections and, presumably, a fair amount of game-related attire - and pick out items to bring to your wardrobe. "You've also got the option to save outfit combinations to your local drive," says Sutherland, "so if you've got a particular Tuesday outfit you can wear that, and if you've got something you want to wear for a particular game, you can do that." You can mix and match items as you like.

Upon which note, the conversation goes the opposite way, as Eurogamer TV's Johnny Minkley innocently inquires about the naturist community, and your badly-dressed correspondent mentions, er, amputees. "I think the smallest we'll go is bikini," says Musgrave. "You can imagine the political conversations that surround this sort of thing in terms of ethnicity and gender and, as you said, amputees [a pause] and a whole variety of stuff."

Fortunately, Rare also foresaw an obvious problem here: programmers aren't terrific dressers. "Although we've built them, the source and ideas for the designs come from fashion graduates," Sutherland says. Musgrave elaborates: "We didn't feel qualified as a bunch of developers to make the decisions ourselves. We thought hard about the best way to do it, and got in a bunch of people who were younger, much trendier, much more interesting in a fashion sense." Just so. "That's the overriding thing about the whole avatar project: the underlying character represents you in some way, and communicates your personality in some way on Live, so you can change what you wear as easily as you would with a real-world wardrobe."

Cynics will point to Microsoft's massive Xbox Live Marketplace income and steel themselves for an onslaught of sponsored ranges and expensive designer Avatar outfits, but Musgrave reiterates Microsoft and Rare's previously stated desire to give clothing away as bonuses too - as developers currently do with Achievements and gamer pictures. Does this mean they're doing that with Banjo and Viva Piñata, then? "That's...probably something I can't talk about!" Musgrave blanches. "To what extent and how that manifests itself is something I think will be quite fun. It's not going to be a T-shirt with a Banjo logo on it or anything like that. It's going to be fashion-inspired or IP-inspired or Xbox-inspired, so as cool and compelling as possible."

And of course it's meant to be fun. We don't get to handle the Avatar tools ourselves, but Sutherland shows off a few elements. "So one of those is the ability to move your head around with the right analogue stick," he notes. "If I move the head left and right, it will have an effect on the character. These are little things that, they're not called out on the menu or anything, but just things people can discover." Like the Miis, then, it's about building people's affection for the tool. "Yeah, so hopefully they'll sit here and play around with it and have a bit of fun."

That'll be important, too, if Avatars are to achieve every character-customisation tool's dream and drive a million novelty Hitlers into the wild. Musgrave rolls his eyes a bit. "We have internal emails like you wouldn't believe - all sorts of Solid Snakes and Hitlers and the Chuckle Brothers and there's all sorts. It's proof of the versatility of it. We try to encourage it, so a lot of people have it installed on their kits here and just mess with it and post it around to say 'I've made Jennifer Aniston' or something."

Which is exactly what we want to hear. After all, Xbox Live Primetime's 1 vs. 100 game-show is coming up soon - a TV-style quiz with a real-life host, and a key element of Microsoft's hope to not only dominate the living room, but to transform Xbox 360 into a nightly event. And if the first episode isn't populated ninety-eight Hitlers, Santa and Britney Spears, facing off against a bewildered Z-list reality sleb with a bunch of digital cue-cards, we'll be bitterly disappointed.