If you're like me, Greatfather Winter didn't put a golden ticket or an uber laptop in your holiday stocking. And with my luck, I'll probably never win the Figure Prints lottery, either. Sad, but that's the reality of the situation.

Enter Grumpycoder with their WoW PaperIdol. While they may not offer a rl figurine, they are the first to provide (that I know of) portrait and full body pictures that auto-update the look of your character as your Armory equipment changes.

What this means is you'll be able to not only keep up with every alt you've accumulated over the years, you can now show them off in their current state of progression. No more WoW blogs with outdated character picts and no more forum avatars that look like you just hit level 5. Feel free to proclaim out into the interwebs what lewts you got last night, safe in the knowledge that without lifting a finger, everyone can see exactly how bad they clash with your Beguiler Robes.

We'll be giving WoW PaperIdol a test drive after the jump!

Player character, character, avatar, toon... Regardless of the term you use to refer to your in-game persona, I'm pretty sure we're talking about the same thing. And today, I'm curious: how many characters do you play? If advancement is your aim, it makes a lot of sense to focus your time and energy on a single character. If efficiency is your goal, perhaps you have a pair of characters to switch between depending on rested XP or what roles your party might need filled. But if your interest is variety, perhaps you have a character of each class -- or more. For my part, I actively maintain three characters. My main (a healer) raids and in my spare time I'm leveling up two alts: one to farm with (better than my healer can) and one to tank (as tanking seems to be the hardest to find component for instance groups). Three seems to be about as many as I can juggle actively -- though I have a mid-level Paladin waiting in the wings, working on it would mean I'd neglect another character. Now that I've told my tale, I'm asking you: how many characters do you play, and why?

(Sorry, I couldn't resist the terrible visual pun.)

One of the most common criticisms of fantasy games, besides "LOL games are for the nerds go outside", is that they perpetuate unrealistic stereotypes of female bodies. The typical fantasy girl, or so they say, is wearing about two pounds of chainmail, has a 20-inch waist and a DD-cup, and somehow manages to swing a sword that is taller than she is without messing up her hair.

But while messing around with the WoW character creation screen, I realized that WoW really doesn't hold up to that stereotype. The human and gnome females are average size (well, as close as a gnome can be) and curvy. Night elves, trolls and draenei are thin but toned, easily able to sling around a Thunderfury. Warcraft dwarves, orcs and trolls would probably be considered overweight by most societal standards, but their bodies are proportional and they're extremely muscular. In fact, the only two really skinny models are the undead and blood elf females, both of which are repeatedly referenced as being unhealthy in the game. The blood elves are thin because of their magic addiction, and the undead are thin because of ... uh, being dead.

In comparison, I took a look at the body types of the men. Human, dwarf, night elf, draenei, orc and tauren men are all ridiculously muscular, to the point where it looks like they've stuffed cantaloupes under the skin of their arms. Blood elf males are thin but toned, gnome males look about average (again, for a gnome), and undead and trolls are thin and hunchbacked. It seems that the men of WoW are the ones that suffer from an unrealistic standard of beauty.

So I ask you -- would you like the ability for your avatars to have different body types? Do you think that the men and womeny things of WoW are unrealistic, or do you feel that you have enough options?

The always-interesting Terra Nova has a piece up about Nick Yee's the Proteus Effect, which is based around how we relate to (and interact with) stimuli in virtual worlds, specifically our and others' avatars.

Basically, almost all of the research so far shows that we react to virtual stimuli exactly the same way as if it were real stimuli-- we don't want our characters standing too close to other characters, because it's a social convention in the real world that we all have our own individual space. But we still react positively to attractive avatars, whether we know it or not. No matter how much we're supposed to be roleplaying, or how much we realize consciously that the virtual world is different from the real world, we still react in a real way to virtual stimuli. It's heady stuff, but here's Terra Nova's soundbite, by Dmitri Williams: "You can take the person out of the real, but not the real out of the person."

And Williams closes with an extremely interesting proposition, considering how the interaction works: what if, by making many parts of Outland dark and gloomy, Blizzard has caused us to react realistically and feel depressed? TN's informal survey says that players' favorite zone is Nagrand-- is that because it's sunny and green there? And if so, what does that say about our reaction to the expected upcoming expansion-- should Blizzard reconsider the dark, cold stretches of Northrend for a more tropical locale?