I’m Not A Barbie Girl In A Barbie World

But 4 million are. FOUR MILLION.

  • http://weblog.probablynot.com Jason

    I didn’t realize there were that many pedophiles in the world…

  • Dren

    We’re a Webkinz family here. My wife was arguing with my son just last night that he was spending money from his sister’s account, not his own.

    Then they proceeded to talk about how my daughter spends all her money, but has a really nice house with tons of rooms…

    Yeah, this stuff is the future.

  • yunk

    I am still anxiously waiting the release of Lego Universe. I’m 35 and want to play Legos online. Is that normal?

  • Neep

    No.

    But I’m 26 and want to play with legos online, so I won’t hold it against you.

  • Sweetmeat

    I’m almost tempted to try it out, but being a 41 year old male, I would feel creepy doing it. I think their numbers are probably more real and less hype than SL.

  • Please

    It must be slightly normal, since I’m inbetween both of your ages and would pay money to play a Lego MMOG. The first I’d pay for since UO.

  • xaldin

    It is kinda scary to behold that kind of number. Is it the beefed up internet cafe type numbers or honest to god monthly payout variety?

  • Female Gamer

    One moment while I go hurl.

    Okay, back. That feels better.

    About ten years ago, in a newspaper column I wrote back then, I was sharply critical of “pinkware” games. In particular, I condemned the fact that while games for boys that encouraged exploration, planning, leadership, or even just good motor skills, games for girls focused almost entirely on looking pretty or navigating familiar real-life social situations. (“Rockett’s New School” got singled out for heavy-duty skewering) The game developers were encouraging boys to strive to become more than they were, and girls to become less — merely walking, talking dolls whose worth was measured by their ability to match current trends in fashion, about as trivial and superficial value as you can get.

    Now we’re seeing it go online. And I am disgusted.

    I’m a child of the 60′s. Yeah, there are female gamers that old. Deal. I remember the struggles for things as simple as being allowed to wear pants to school instead of skirts. I remember being told, as a young child, that “girls couldn’t be” all the things I wanted to be when I grew up — an astronaut, a truck driver, a mechanic. I remember in junior high, fighting in vain to be allowed to take shop instead of home ec. It was all about having dreams — about the right to dream — about being able to do anything you were capable of doing, about being anything you were capable of being.

    And now girls have a choice between games which portray female avatars as hypersexualized bimbos and whose marketing clearly says “no gurlz allowed in klubhouse” and games which limit girls’ activities to shopping and dressing up — in short, games where the goal is to become a fashion doll. Playthings to make girls into playthings.

    Where is the spaceport? Where is the racetrack? Where is the mountain trail? Where is anything, in short, but the most superficial, trivial “life” anyone could imagine.

    They hype their protective mechanisms — all sorts of ways to keep those girls from hearing any bad words. But what is going to protect the girls from the game itself? What is going to protect them from the game’s core concept, that all the things that my generation and those before us fought to achieve are meaningless, and girls should aspire to be nothing more than shallow, trivial playthings?

    I think I need to go PvP some.

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    Isn’t it a bit retro to blame men for the fact that some girls like girly things?

  • Mandella

    Basic subscriptions to Barbie World are free and never run out, so I imagine that most girls do what my daughter did — get into it intensely for a couple days then run out of things to do and move on to something else, occasionally dropping back in to “check out the scene” every few weeks when she is bored.

    Chat is so moderated it is hard to make yourself understood, and I am not sure what the answer to this is in any kid’s game as it seems a major stumbling block to fun — but of course is seen as absolutely necessary to protect from online predators.

    Actually, the chat filter mechanic they have chosen is interesting. Instead of filtering certain words in a database, it takes the opposite approach — it only *allows* words in its database. What this means in practice is (at the moment) no contractions, no strings of numbers, and of course all words must be correctly spelled (although I lolled to find that lol was included).

    Oh, and my little girl took about an hour to find one good way to circumvent this — it will allow you to type in one letter per line, so… Also we both got a kick out of one angry little girl running around saying “Heel!” “You are all Heel!”.

  • Xanthippe

    I’m also a child of the 60′s, but I find Female Gamer’s attitude to be oppressively matriarchal and limiting. This isn’t the 60′s.

    It’s fine for girls to be girly – in fact, as my 8 year old daughter has taught me, girliness is something one is born into, it’s not thrust upon them. Nothing else explains how I ended up having a girly girl – I am pretty far away from that. Another things she’s taught me is to have respect for girly girls. She can’t help being girly any more than I could help being a tomboy.

    My daughter enjoys the new Barbie online thing. For me, the Barbie voices are puke-inducing, but I’m not my daughter, and I’m not the one playing, so I really don’t care. It’s certainly not dangerous, jeez.

    It’s one part of her games experience. A very limited part, as she also plays Club Penguin (and much prefers that one), World of Warcraft, Harvest Moon, the Sims, Legos Starwars, Zoo Tycoon and Destroy All Humans.

  • Female Gamer

    Isn’t it a bit retro to blame men for the fact that some girls like girly things?

    Where do I blame men? For all I know, the developers of Barbie World are 100% female. I never said a word about who was at fault. I just criticized the product, and the mindset it enforces.

    Xanthippe, I’m pretty sure “matriarchal” wasn’t the word you were looking for, as I also didn’t mention anything about who is, or should be, in charge. And “limiting”? How is it limiting to say that girls should have the same opportunities to dream of being something more than they are that boys do, instead of being directed to a very narrow, restricted role?

    The real limiting here is in the way Barbie World so strongly limits the scope of what it presents, with all the authority of an adult-sanctioned commercial product, a model of what a girl’s world should be. That world has no place for anything except clothes (renamed “fashions”) and prettiness. The girls can’t go bike riding (let alone mountain biking), or build things, or race little go-karts a la Nexon’s wildly popular (12 million users, 700k concurrent users) Kart Rider. There’s no “Barbie the Airline Pilot” here, or even “Barbie the Stewardess”. It presents the idealized girl’s life as going to the mall, dressing up, and sitting in rooms talking. THAT is limiting.

    I was never a girly girl, despite my parents’ best efforts to make me one. But I never saw myself as a tomboy, either. I just wanted to do fun things. Catching frogs was fun, wearing the “right” clothes was boring. I recognize that some people see it the other way around, and I suppose it saves a lot of wear and tear on the frogs. But, in the long run, the “girly” lifestyle can lead to someone who is less of a person — just an animated plaything — and not a full contributor to society. A person, male or female, needs dreams beyond looking visually appealing to other people. Beau Brummel died destitute. Human beings need purpose other than being decorative accessories. That’s where the limitation comes in — telling girls “this is what you are” instead of “you can aspire to anything.”

    We wouldn’t give our children toys that cripple their bodies, so why give them toys that cripple their minds?

  • JuJutsu

    “We wouldn’t give our children toys that cripple their bodies, so why give them toys that cripple their minds?”

    At the end of your previous post you said you thought you would go PvP some. That’s when I lost all interest in your opinions on raising kids.

  • Scott Jennings

    Yes, because clearly all people who enjoy PvP are hardened killers in real life.

  • http://mythicalblog.com Jeff Freeman

    Where do I blame men? For all I know, the developers of Barbie World are 100% female. I never said a word about who was at fault. I just criticized the product, and the mindset it enforces.

    You sure didn’t. I’m very sorry.

    I do disagree with you in that I don’t see girls as being limited to playing Barbie. If anything, they have more choices than boys. They can play Barbie or Kart Rider or anything else without any (much?) social stigma for their choice: Boys playing Barbie better keep keep quiet about it.

    As for how shallow – or superficial – it is, that seems common to all games. Most take kind of one thing and make their game about that.

    On the one hand, it’s impossible to make a single game with everything in it. They made the Barbie game about playing dress-up. But that’s what Barbies are about; presumably what those interested in playing Barbie are interested in doing (between sessions of Kart Rider). It doesn’t prohibit girls from playing other games or prevent other games being made.

    I’m sorry your parents tried to make you into something you weren’t. Isn’t it kind of the same thing to forbid playing dress-up if that’s what a girl wants to do? I mean, if it’s not all the girl ever wants to do…

    Reminds me of criticism about Danica McKellar’s book; really just for it acknowledging that lots of girls do care about girly stuff (and not allowing that to exclude an interest in math).

    It just sounds like you’re saying, “Girls must NEVER play dress-up.”

    But I don’t want to put words in your mouth again. The game you describe, though? Why limit that to a female audience by tying it to Barbie? Lots of guys would dig that too.

  • Female Gamer

    At the end of your previous post you said you thought you would go PvP some. That’s when I lost all interest in your opinions on raising kids.

    Just how, exactly, does my liking for competing against other players instead of against a highly predictable computer program relate to the validity of my opinions on raising kids? Or do you only accept opinions from women who fit your stereotypes, and it’s a common stereotype that female gamers don’t like PvP? Sorry to bust up your stereotypes there, JuJutsu, but I do prefer competing against real opponents, with all their variety and intelligence and unpredictability, instead of computer programs. My reference to PvP was meant as “I need to go do something stereotypically ‘un-girly’” after seeing and discussing all that pinkness … what did you read into it?

    I didn’t get my PvP, though. :( Got interrupted and had to log before my battleground slot came up.

  • http://Jeezle.. Erkht

    Everyone goes all serious on it, when to me it seems just goofy and predictable; like the sinking feeling you get when every oasis that appears in the night as you cross the country has a home depot, a costco, a roundtable and a starbux.. Everyone wanted girls in gaming, and (piccard voiceover) “there it sits!!”, the market speaks, loud and clear..

    But my first thought was, where’s TonkaBoys Online? And next logical question, can the boys in their bulldozers crossover into Barbieland and do some major mayhem?

    BvB!!

    Woot!

  • Mandella

    Heh.. Looks like that “other” thread crossed over to here.

    But I imagine that Barbie Incorporated probably agrees with Female Gamer more than you might think. At least for the last few decades, Barbie has been pushed as the girl who can do *anything,* and look good doing it, darnit! The message is that you can do anything any guy could do, but not have to give up being girly to do it.

    With that official dogma in mind, Barbie Girl does seem sparse, and could use a lot more activities to hold interest. There is only so many times you can try on a virtual dress without boring even the most fashion obsessed. But it is still listed as being in Beta, so I would be very surprised if there weren’t some big changes coming.

    Also, no mention has been made that to get to the “really” good stuff, you need to buy the MP3 player and dock it into your computer.

  • Female Gamer

    Ah, yes, the $60 doll-shaped MP3 player. The game is “free” all right, but for what it really costs, you could buy WoW and a few months of playing time. Okay, Puzzle Pirates if you prefer. Or a whole lot of goodies in Kart Rider. And I’m sure that there will be further upgrades available … “but Mommy, all my friends have Barbie Puppies, I need the $60 plastic poodle!”

    TANSTAAFL. Or TANSTAAFG, in this case.

  • Xanthippe

    Female Gamer, “matriarchal” was precisely the word I was looking for. To assert that girls cannot embrace their inner Barbie because it might prevent them from becoming astronauts is as oppressive and limiting as patriarchy is only from the feminist point of view. It was a play on words that apparently failed.

    It’s a Barbie game. That’s what Barbie is about. Dressing up and shopping. In other news, water is wet.

    Your complaints strike me as similar to other complaints about video games – Doom makes people killers, GTA makes people criminals, etc.

    “…the game’s core concept, that all the things that my generation and those before us fought to achieve are meaningless, and girls should aspire to be nothing more than shallow, trivial playthings?”

    Maybe you could give Jack Thompson a call and get a class action suit going?

  • Female Gamer

    Xanthippe, I am attempting to have a civilized discussion here. Your insults make that difficult. This is a subject worthy of discussion, and it seems to me that you want to turn these comments from such a discussion into a mud-throwing contest.

    If I ever give Jack Thompson a call, I’ll probably be arrested for what I say to him.

    I refuse to follow the politically correct school of thought that says all possible decisions, all possible actions, all possible lifestyles, are equally worthwhile. Call me old-fashioned, but I see differences in social worth between the choices, and the outcomes of those choices, we make in life. I see what Scott, our fine host, does for a living as a much higher calling than, say, what Jack Thompson does. Political correctness has made a mockery of equality. All people are entitled to equal rights, but that does not mean that all the things people do are of equal value. Devoting your life to finding a cure for cancer and devoting your life to bumming quarters off random passers-by are not equal in my eyes, and only someone blinded by political correctness could say that they are. And, yes, I believe that a life as an animated decoration is on the less positive end of the scale.

  • =j

    Great Googly Moogly. Are we really having a Game vs. World discussion about BarbieOnline?

  • Female Gamer

    Shouldn’t we?

    No matter what the folks at Terra Nova think, there is no dividing line. Some multiplayer environments are more worldy. Some are more gamey (and some players are very gamy, but that’s a matter for another day). But it’s just as valid a topic of discussion when it’s about Barbie Online as it is about Second Life.

    I prefer the Game vs. Toy breakdown myself. I think that’s more informative, and more useful in the long run, than Game vs. World.

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