It's looking increasingly likely that you'll be able to map your face - at least, in cartoon form - into Wii games. Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that the caricatures used for the Wii Tennis E3 demo were more than just a publicity stunt.

At Nintendo's recent pre-E3 conference, the tennis game from Wii Sports was demoed using “cartoonalikes” of Nintendo honchos Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata and Reggie Fils-Aime as the onscreen tennis players. When recently asked whether this feature would appear in the final game, Miyamoto gave a rather vague answer, saying, "We have some different ideas about how to take advantage of that functionality and we will be sharing that type of functionality with third parties."

But since then, Miyamoto has been talking to MTV and revealed that Wii Sports "features these little models which you can put your own faces on." This statement alone isn't terribly revolutionary, as character customization has become almost a given in this generation. However, when you factor in Miyamoto's follow-up comment, things get more interesting; "Then you may start to see those characters, with faces you've created, appearing in different games on the Wii system."

Above: So, the lesson is this: if you see a blonde schmoe playing baseball in your game, he may actually be a beautiful Japanese girl. Especially if there's one in the room with you.

Unfortunately, he didn't elaborate further on the second part, but he seems to be suggesting that the console will store the face-mapping and then slip the data into other games. That's something much less common. Does this mean that you could eventually see yourself wandering around in Animal Crossing or appearing as a boss in Zelda?

It's a bizarre concept and we're trying to figure out if it would be a welcome one. Nintendo refuses to comment on speculation but we'll be following the face-mapping - for lack of a better term - story closely.

May 30, 2006