Inspired by Sony’s “The Quest for Antonia” model search, Bonnie asks what it means when real women fashion themselves after on-screen characters.

In the gaming world, real women aren’t easy to come by. Game developers spend a lot of time and energy making sure their female characters appear realistic, endowing them with the looks and the “physics” of true-to-life beauties. So what happens when that dynamic gets flipped on its head, when real women start trying to look like video game characters?

This spring, Sony Online Entertainment and Stuff Magazine launched a model search campaign, The Quest for Antonia, which they describe proudly as, “The world’s first pageant to determine a video-game heroine look-alike!” Named for the Everquest II character the contest aims to rediscover - a brunette with blue eyes, big lips, bigger breasts and visibly countable ribs - The Quest promises a $10,000 modeling contract and a “sexy pictorial” in Stuff to its grand prize winner. Selected finalists “may be eligible to win a trip to fabulous Las Vegas” to compete in a live beauty pageant. Anyone female and twenty-one or older can enter. Though internet users can vote on their favorite faux-Antonia, final decisions are made by a panel of judges, who will evaluate contestants in two areas: look alike-ness and “star power.” Promises The Quest, “Here’s your chance to turn fantasy into reality!”

Nintendo’s press conference manages to both stun fans and under-deliver at the same time, despite showing off not one, but two new hardware devices.

Nintendo’s had a rough few years. It’s never quite managed to live up to the expectations that its most rabid fans have for the company that brought video games back from the brink of extinction. When the biggest game Nintendo unveils during a press conference is a Pac Man “connectivity” title, you know the company is struggling to inspire its legions of followers.

This year, expectations were set incredibly high, perhaps unfairly so. Microsoft launches a prime-time MTV special (during sweeps no less) in order to promote Xbox 360. Sony counters at its press conference with a PlayStation 3 console that appears to include everything but the kitchen sink, including the mammoth storage capacity of BluRay. Nintendo had been dropping hints over the last week, information started to leak out, but Nintendo still managed to surprise the crowd. Sort of.