Nintendo's latest Wii Channel, Check Mii Out, greatly facilitates the sharing of personalized Mii avatars. However, GameCritics opines that the channel was way too late for the party to allow creative talent to make a geniune foothold. Since the launch of the Wii, the relative inconvenience in sharing Miis before Check Mii Out's debut meant it was simply easier for users to post tutorials detailing the creation process of their Miis.

These tutorials themselves are meant to be useful guides for personal use, but GameCritics laments the number of contributors on Check Mii Out who have used them to basically copy other Miis to post as their own. We can imagine that not all such contributions are truly malicious in intent; if a user has a Mii he/she likes regardless of how they made it, they may not feel it is wrong to post it for the purpose of sharing. On the other hand, it is also not unreasonable for the original creators to ask for proper credit. Unfortunately, as with other types of game contributions here or elsewhere, this is not always easy to establish.

Looking over the submissions of several of these “artisans” revealed that a large proportion of their Miis were exact or nearly-exact copies of designs created by other artists, mostly from MiiPlaza.net. It’s too bad that these copycats don’t seem to have any problem stealing other people's work and shamelessly passing it off as their own. What’s lacking here is a firm sense of Mii ethics.

The sad thing is that this could have all been avoided if Nintendo had provided some of the services contained in the Check Mii Out Channel from the beginning. The old system for sending and receiving Miis preserved the identity of the original creator in that any Miis received from another user are tagged with that user’s name and are un-editable. But since Nintendo made it so absurdly difficult to send Miis, this feature turned out to be of little use. Players found it easier to just copy the Miis from pictures and tutorials.

Now that it's here, the Check Mii Out Channel provides a relatively easy way for Wii owners to distribute Miis. It's just too bad it's showing up so late.

Wolfwood via gamecritics.com »