Fat Avatar for Fat Gamer
By Bala Shah

Slashdot is an iconic technology news site popular with geeks.  It readership is intelligent and post insightful, funny comments about every article on Slashdot.  In fact, most articles are sent in by its readers.  Slashdot Editors are the gatekeepers who decide which article is uploaded and which does not make the cut.

Slashdot gets more than 6 million readers every month. Its motto is ‘News for nerds, stuff that matters’.

Slashdot articles cover all things geek – right from the latest operating system bugs in smart phones to how Microsoft harms the open source community.  Anything that would interest geeks can be found here.

Slashdot has just published details of how Microsoft has applied for a patent to try to help overweight people who use Microsoft platforms to play games.

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A newly disclosed Microsoft patent application — Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic — takes aim at fat people, proposing to generate fat avatars in gaming environments for individuals whose health records indicate they're overweight, limiting their game play, and even banning them. From the patent application: 'An undesirable body weight could be reflected in an overweight or underweight appearance for the avatar. Only requisite health levels are allowed to compete in a certain competition level. A dedicated gamer could exercise for a period of time until his health indicator gadget shows a sufficiently high health/health credit in order to allow reentering the avatar environment.' Linking one's gaming avatar to one's physique, explains Microsoft, will produce healthy and virtuous behaviors in individuals. Microsoft also proposes shaping gaming experiences by using 'psychological and demographic information such as education level, geographic location, age, sex, intelligence quotient, socioeconomic class, occupation, marital/relationship status, religious belief, political affiliation, etc
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