Game: Stardoll
Creator: Stardoll AB, Glorious Games
Platform: stardoll.com, Adobe glass player
Genre(s): Fashion, Style, Social
Target audience: Anybody who likes dress up games, ages 12+, likely targeted towards girls ages 12-16
Chess begins Gaming Feminism with the claim “Video games are too often associated with masculinity. There are reasons for this,” yet she believes that we can use market power, introducing women and other avenues of diversity into the gaming industry, to demand change. She argues that in the gaming world, the consumers bring the money and the gaming companies must inevitably cater to the capital.
Stardoll is a game, reaching its height in 2016 around the time of GamerGate that facilitates a “different kind of gamer… demonstrating that women [and girls] do want to play games.” The pink games movement of the 1990s gears girls towards games that could increase their interest and success in STEM, more utilitarian than playful. Predecessors to Stardoll, like “Barbie Fasion Designer”, which Chess cites, kicked off a wave of dress-up games that could provide hours of creativity, imagination, and storytelling for girls and others who enjoy fashion. Stardoll de-sexualizes the female and male bodies in the dress-up world and makes game play about fashion, style, and personal expression. I remember playing hours myself as a kid and finding the same joy in replaying the game as an adult, tapping into Sensation, Expression, and Narrative fun – delighting in the creative outfit and color combinations I put together, navigating and exploring the doll world in whatever order I pleased, and imaging stories for every character I dressed up.
Stardoll also brings a modern dimension, a social take, beyond its dress-up predecessors, providing social engagement and fulfillment to its young, sometimes lonely, and potentially questioning (queer or otherwise) players.
Reading the Wikipedia page for Stardoll, its parent game company, Glorious Games AB, started with Stardoll and expanded to “focus on creating safe and entertaining games for young women, an audience usually overlooked by the gaming industry.” One idea for improvement along this mission is for Stardoll to provide more diversity in the body shapes of the dress-up dolls offered. While players can customize their own characters to any body size and skin color they’d like, the dress-up dolls themselves come in one limited Barbie-like size, likely to make development easier but undoubtedly inadvertently perpetuating unrealistic body standards. Despite this improvement, Stardoll provides a safe haven for girls and other young gamers interested in fashion, asking nothing of its players but to express their own creativity and narrative.
Discussion question: What makes a “computer game” different from a “video game”? Do you think a dress-up game does not fit into a commonly accepted notion of a video game because it lacks essential game mechanic elements or perhaps because it does not address the traditionally accepted target audience for video games – tween and teenage boys to young men?
