Online games publisher Emote Games announced Participate, a social platform designed to help game developers build social networking functions and add avatar creation capabilities to their games for use on various devices. With Participate integrated into websites or games allows, avatars are created to order on dedicated servers and can be viewed on web-enabled devices. The character technology selects and blends between combinations of hair, ethnicity, skin color, and body type to create individual avatars. Based in Liverpool, Emote Games specialized in developing cross-platform social games and technologies. The studio recently picked up £600,000 ($902,000) in funding from The Technology Strategy Board to support Emote’s development of AI-controlled social agents, in collaboration with the London's Imperial College. The company also announced The Hunter, a hunting simulator that uses Participate to offer social networking features. Users can make friends, form groups, create rivalries, take part in competitions against each other, or work with other players to complete challenges. "Participate can generate endless character combinations, and once the user has made their selection, they can continue to personalise, adding make-up and jewellery, changing their hairstyle and clothing, and even the environment they appear in," says Emote COO David Rose. "Our forthcoming game [The Hunter] uses all the features within Participate, which will allow gamers to share their identity not just within the games environment but right across other social networks.”