Think of it as training wheels for girls who will one day grow up to be long-legged blondes in Second Life. MyLife is a product aimed at girls, and how encouraging that you don’t have any of the pesky range of avatar types that you can find in the more fluid and open Second Life.

As reported at the Sydney Morning Herald, myLife has a fairly superficial avatar creation process. Hey! Superficial sounds bad!

“Designing your avatar is a highly superficial process. You choose between tall, average and short stature, and thin, average or big builds; once all the girls have chosen tall and thin, they’ll then have to select skin colour (white, chocolate brown or fake-tanned), hair style, eye colour and shape, and the size of their nose and pout. Personality, intelligence and interests are clearly unimportant. Regardless of your choices, your avatar is bound to end up looking like a Bratz doll – grossly disproportionate and overtly sexualised.”

myLife also avoids the pesky problems of having too much to do, focusing on those things that girls find important anyways, like, um, looking after the dog and taking a bath or something:

The game revolves around ensuring the avatar eats, sleeps, washes, looks after the dog and attends school regularly – if not, she winds up in the hospital purchasing a “super medicine” that cures all her problems or is denied her allowance by Dad, who is eternally parked in front of the home TV. Woe betide if she’s spent her allowance at the mall and can’t afford the medicine. Even a phone call to Mum, who is confined to the kitchen, can’t help – you’ll have to restart the game from scratch.

It’s unknown whether little boys will run out to buy myLife. Certainly the percentage of people in virtual worlds who have avatars of a different gender would indicate that we can expect all the boys on the block to be running around with the cute pink consoles.

Look for myLife to facilitate a steady stream of girls from this game, to the Teen Grid, to Second Life. Hopefully they won’t be too disappointed to find that there are so many more options for being a woman than the size of your pout.

File under extreme sarcasm.