I was so excited this morning to wake up and finally give the new X-Box Live Experience a quick spin before I head off to work. Right off the bat it was disappointing, the installation routine was quick and easy, but the first thing I noticed was – where the heck are avatars for black people? It’s bad enough that when I used to go to E3, I would be like one of maybe 5 or 10 black people at a convention that had over 70,000 people in attendance, now I have to look at all of these White and Asian avatars. I had to click the more button 4 times before I finally found one, ONE, black female model and I didn’t see any black male models. The creation tools are excellent and I was able to create my custom avatar. But it felt like a slap in the face that out of the samples on the front screen they couldn’t squeeze in a representation of black male and female models. It’s pathetic really. For the last ten years the game industry has given lip service about gaming diversity but things like this don’t help. I’m not one who sees everything through the lens of race, but this is just so blatant it’s hard to ignore. Beyond this, there other problems with the service which I’ll go into later today.