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These are the five people you’ll meet at pretend E3You can randomise E3’s avatar maker as much as you like, but you’ll always get one of these five faces
You can randomise E3’s avatar maker as much as you like, but you’ll always get one of these five faces
For more than a year now, the events industry has been in something of a total war footing, as hundreds of thousands of minds have set themselves to the challenge of proving that a website can, indeed, be a live event. Many experimental web design gimmicks have been deployed in the course of this effort, in the same way that bizarre new forms of life tend to proliferate after mass extinctions. Some have felt inspired. Some have felt sad. And some, of course, have been E3’s eerie, Picrew-esque avatar system.
The PC Gaming Weekspot: E3 2021 Predictions: Xbox, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Square Enix and More!Watch on YouTube
The PC Gaming Weekspot: E3 2021 Predictions: Xbox, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Square Enix and More!
The E3 avatar designer offers a neat, sensible way to produce facsimiles of most human faces from a relatively small collection of assets. In a way, it’s a very impressive bit of design. And yet, perhaps in a bid to stop dickheads like me going full Monster Factory on it, it has been made weirdly conservative. This is abusinessevent, see, and it doesn’t want you to be too silly.
The result is a system wherein infinite variety is possible, and yet where it is fundamentally impossible to create a face that feels very far from some intangible norm. Or, to be more accurate, some intangible norms. Because after mashing the “randomise” button on my profile setup page for a full half hour, I began to identify a number of distinct aesthetic archetypes which all E3 avatars tended to gravitate towards.
Yes, it transpired, I could. And so, brave explorer of the digital events frontier, I present to you now: the Five People You’ll Meet At Pretend E3:
1. Bitcoin Dracula
Freshly risen from their ghastly crypt of currency, Bitcoin Dracula smells perfect, dresses immaculately, and wants to tell you all about their exciting new NFT-based MMO project, which somehow involves about forty companies you’ve heard of, but always in some inexplicable, hastily-moved-on-from capacity. If you maintain eye contact with Bitcoin Dracula for more than eight seconds, you will suddenly find yourself on a podcast, discussing Elon Musk against your will.
2. Revenant Spirit
Oddly, given how insistent it is otherwise to stick within the broadly agreed parameters of humanity, E3’s avatar generator is pretty liberal in its allowance of vast, glaring scarlet eyes. And there is simply no way for a face like this to possess massive red eyes andnotlook like a ghost that’s shown up to strangle you at three in the morning. The archetype transcends mere red eyes, however - just check out Turbodad in the middle there, and try not to react like those apocryphal bumpkins from the early 1900s, jumping away in terror from footage of an onrushing train.
3. Apologetic Alien
Of course, the E3 avatar generator swings hard in the other direction too, with a surprising number of the faces produced expressing some kind of enigmatic, cosmic sorrow. Often, it’s paired with a sort of desperate, bone-deep embarassment. Add to that the surprisingly wide range of light-coloured makeup choices on offer, and you end up with a whole cadre of folks who look like they’ve just been transmitted across the galaxy as a stream of tachyons, before materialising in the middle of a networking event, and shitting right in the canapes.
4. Journo Monkey
5. Unknowable Goat Person
Also, Chief O’Brien Off Of Deep Space Nine
The man is, quite literally, in a class of his own.
E3 2021 will be running from 12th-15th June. Please see ourE3 schedule postfor more, genuinely useful information on the whole virtual shebang, and visit ourE3 2021hub to stay up to date on all the latest news.
