I’m Not A Barbie Girl In A Barbie World

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.

No.

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

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.

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.

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!”.

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?

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

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.

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, “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?

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