Mii and My Son

My son's initial fascination with Wii did not come from its games , what attracted my son first to Wii was Mii.



Mii is that section of Wii that lets you create your own game characters. Basically, it was designed to make you personalize some of your Wii games by making caricatures of yourself. So that when you are playing the games, you can see "yourself" on the screen playing it and not some pre-made character.



It is very entertaining specially for my son who loves artistic detail and whose sense of color is quite acute. Mii lets him choose the shape and size of the face of the character you are creating. It lets him choose in intricate detail: the shape, size, expression of the lips, the eyes, the nose and the ears. It lets him select the hairstyle, different moustaches or not, even the size of moles the faces of his creation if he want any. You have total control over your creations, its like Corel Draw Lite.



Aside from the face, it lets you choose the size of the body: slim, thin, chubby or fluffy. It lets you choose the type and color of shirt and pants. Short pants of every color imaginable are also available for his dabbling.



For example, not only has River created the characters for each member of our family but he has created the character of each and every relative he remembers: his cousins, his Titos and Titas, in intricate detail and in shockingly accurate ways. When he created my character I was flabbergasted by the comic caricature of myself as my son saw it in his mind. He got every detail of my face, he's spot on in the matter of my physique and he knows what colors I like to wear.



But not only did he create characters for our family and relatives. He also created each and everyone of his 17 classmates as well. And some of their parents too ! The accuracy of his memory stuns you to disbelief. His choice of facial expressions is hilarious and comical, but only because they are accurate.



Whenever we go to the mall, in the early Days of Wii, he spends 2 hours or more making characters of all kinds. He has a character for McCain, Hillary and Obama which he probably got from my geek-level focus on the US campaign. He also makes characters from scratch like an artist making something out of pure canvas and raw paint.



Many kids who are in line for a try on the Wii consoles they let you play around stores here like Best Buy, the almost gone Circuit City and Game Stop get impatient. They just get exasperated by his near total concentration on creating Mii characters. Because, you see he recreates the characters back home on these sample Wiis and he does not stop until he fills up the all 100 spaces alllocated to them.



Thats right, he creates 100 characters every time we visit the Mall, and kids are practically begging him to play the featured game already. Which he is oblivious to, of course, he just shuts down on the rest of the world and enters the Land of Mii in the Village of Mii. He swings his body and perspires when he's doing this, his focus is total. Its like watching a great piano player play his composition, he is totally in that zone and it hits him like a bug.

Thats Mii and my son.