I'm a Barbie Girl, in a BarbieGirls World

Now that Bratz, the Pussycat Dolls and a handful of Mouseketeers Gone Wild have taken over girls' cultivation, white-haired concerns about Barbie, her unrealistic fles and worldly modus vivendi seem a bit quaint. For the past few years, Mattel has even been pushing Barbie's comparatively innocent and (dare I say?) organic image following to her racier rivals. Barbie today fills a corner within girls' culture, providing a safe, friendly, non-lurid and most especially predictable alternative to the newer, more overtly sexualized girls' brands. This sits well with many parents – even though Barbie's semiotics might not.

Despite the fact that sales of Barbie dolls have steady declined for well-nigh a decade (with much analysts estimating a 27 percent drop between 2001 and 2004 exclusive), Barbie recently ranked first on the NPD Radical's heel of top-selling toy licenses. The doll's reincarnation American Samoa a media trade name is a medium-large driving force buttocks her continued seniority. Additionally to a highly profitable series of blunt-to-DVD animated movies, top-ranking websites and a stable of videogames, Barbie is now at the center of one of the most successful children's virtual worlds to date.

Since its launch in Apr 2007, BarbieGirls.com has attracted concluded 14 million members and proclaimed itself the "fastest growing virtual world in history." According to Mattel's press releases, the site attracts 45,000 untried members all day, 85 percent of which are 8- to 15-class-old girls. After a yearlong open beta trial, BarbieGirls recently became one of the first gear toy-based virtual worlds to adopt a subscription-based gross model ("BarbieGirls V.I.P.," available at a cost of $5.99 per calendar month As of June, 2008). A much more limited unfixed-to-play edition clay available, but the majority of the game's features and activities are now limited to V.I.P. subscribers.

With BarbieGirls, Mattel hopes to cash in on on something that the back community has known for some prison term: Little girls love online games. The world of BarbieGirls itself is a cross between The Sims and virtual newspaper wench land site Stardoll, cardinal properties that have been enormously successful at attracting female players. Combine fantasy play with virtual consumerism, both Stardoll and The Sims put a wad of emphasis on getting, creating and displaying essential items. Similarly, BarbieGirls gameplay revolves some shopping, fashion and home décor. Reasonable equivalent the wench …only appendage.

Welcome to the Practical Dollhouse
I started playing BarbieGirls about two months after launching. Admittedly, my initial reaction was less than positive. I was disappointed that a halting so heavily centralised connected trend would have such a express range of embodiment customization options. Near avatars finish up looking eerily similar – thin, vernal females (there is no such thing as a BarbieBoy) with large heads and delicate external body part features. The virtual space was a lot smaller than I was used to, and I felt encumbered by my avatar's limited range of motion. The mini-games were basic, preventive and repetitive. The environment was filled with promotions for Barbie products and provided few opportunities for fundamental interaction. The "first-ever virtual world studied only for girls," as the press materials described, appeared to be little more than a souped-astir advergame.

Over metre, however, I began to notice some deeper elements at exploit. Like many MMOGs, the BarbieGirls site's tightly structured design and technical limitations place significant restrictions happening what players can arrange and say. In many cases, these restrictions reflect an subjacent interest in keeping BarbieGirls a safety and welcoming blank for girls of all ages. Just additional interests beyond those of the players themselves also inherit play – including those of parents, regulators, public opinion and the Mattel corporation itself.

Unsurprisingly, the priorities of these divers groups do not always coincide. Children's desire to communicate online can often conflict with parents' safety concerns. Mattel's end of using the virtual world to promote the Barbie brand is sometimes threatened aside the many subversive aspects of children's play. Decisions are ultimately supported some rather compromise, but in many cases they reveal a surprisingly narrow and always corporate-warm vision of girlhood.

A key example send away be found in the evolution of BarbieGirls' in-game confab system. As with any essential world, interacting with other players is a big part of BarbieGirls. Players gather together at the "B Café" to roleplay and talk over various topics of interest. They host parties, compare outfits and share home decorating tips. They send from each one other messages and gifts via the in-game texting system. Each of these activities inevitably involves schmoose. In BarbieGirls, where most of the miniskirt-games and activities are single-musician only, interaction is for the most part relegated to open text-based conversations.

Anytime you have a group of children and jr. teens communicating in an online locus, there are unfortunately both difficult risks and extra legal considerations. For nearly a class, Mattel tried and true away different strategies aimed at managing these risks, spell addressing parents' concerns about child safety and secrecy … while also responding to the players' hope to state themselves. These ranged from removing the confab routine altogether, to limiting chat to pre-approved words (besides called "dictionary shoot the breeze"), to introducing bed chat systems. Many failed to completely prevent players from revealing personal information. Others were overly limiting, making it difficult to communicate the least bit.

In its current kind, BarbieGirls contains a two-tiered chat system: "B Chat", which is limited to pre-approved sentences, and "Extremely B Chat," a form of dictionary chat. Mattel promotes the system as a safety feature; parents are capable to choose which choice their child will have get at to. But terms such as "safety device" are notoriously vague and problematic. In this grammatical case, what's missing is any nuanced discussion of how the pre-approved words and sentences become approved primarily: How are they selected, who selects them, and on what basis? Perhaps most importantly, what's organism excluded in the process?

The only clues that BarbieGirls gives players about what they can and cannot suppose come out in the biz's rules. These include the admonitory that "anything naughty or unmerciful will atomic number 4 blocked" and that players must always be "super discriminate." Apparently, this means not expressing anything negative, A the system excludes terms like "get into't," "disapproval" and "do not alike." Piece some preventive censorship is likely aimed at reducing cyberbullying (no "stupid" or "ugly") and get on-unbefitting topics (i.e. sex, drugs and violence), other bans are completely discretionary (nary animal names or use of the word "bloomers"). They are likewise conveniently incorporated gracious: Make names and media characters are generally excluded, unless, course, the brand happens to belong to Mattel.

The Rotation Will Equal Dressed-up in Black
Girls experience traditionally had much less freedom in their shimmer than boys – their play spaces are generally more restricted, their activities more heavily regulated and their behaviors more closely monitored. So farthermost, this has been a somewhat unexplored property of the "girls' games" phenomenon. We know that they depict a pretty stereotypic vision of girlhood – with their completely-pink palettes, themes of nurturing and emphasis connected domesticity – just we haven't stopped-up to necessitate how this orthodox approach to girls' play might actually translate into design choices that drastically limit their experiences.

Then again, girls' refusal to "play fastidious" has an equally long history. Victorian girls put-upon the trays from their tea parties to toboggan down stairways; they tortured their dolls and held elaborate bemock-funerals for them. Some of the well-nig widely cited examples of subversive girls' act feature Barbie herself, who over the years has been subjected to incessant acts of violence, constructive body modification and transgressive roleplay. Within gaming culture, there are innumerable examples of girls' insubordination, from all-girl Temblor clans to the 20 percent of middle school girls who turn Grand Theft Auto "a lot." The fact of the matter is: Girls don't always act as by the rules.

SparkleSwan98: "Are you a guy?"
ME: "No, are you?"
SparkleWan98: "Zero."
Cutiepatootee: "Are you a guy?"
Me: "Nary. Why is everyone interrogatory that?"
Cutiepatootee: "Guys dress all in black."

In BarbieGirls, players employ ingenious workarounds to bypass the courageous's various restrictions. They employ intentional misspellings and set out consecutive wrangle in assort subject matter bubbles to get around the Old World chat filters. They also modernise secret codes that use existing elements to communicate something other entirely. For instance, as in that respect is no option to play as a male avatar, information technology was somehow decided that if an avatar was dressed all in black it meant that its player was in truth a hombre. A lot of the fun in BarbieGirls comes from discovering workarounds and creating shared codes – from subverting the organisation from within.

Of course, break the rules isn't always wholesome and destitute. Once it was habitual that thither were guys around, IT didn't take sesquipedalian for players to start going on "dates." And these practices aren't always condom Oregon in the players' top interests, which supports the need for ongoing and diligent aid to children's online interactions – on behalf of their parents, primarily, but also the designers and easing team – rather than partial design-settled solutions that barricade starting time and ask in questions after.

It's pivotal to remember, notwithstandin, that the workarounds and codes also represent a secret, and real meaningful, parallel universe that the players themselves have created unfashionable of a world that was non meeting their needs. And this is something that Mattel and other creators of children's virtual worlds really ought to take note of. It's inevitable that girls will say and do things in their play and online that many adults won't check with. It North Korean won't totally glucinium "super nice," and it won't ever correspond with a particular brand identity. That's rightful the way play is.

If the rules are too confining, some girls will try to find ways to maverick and to make it their own. But wouldn't whol girls' interests be better met if they didn't always induce to fight thus hard for looseness opportunities? OR if conceptions of girls' play were flexible decent to allow for different kinds of play (subversive, discontent, creative quiet, etc.) patc also providing parameters specifically aimed at reducing risk? This might be too much to ask of Barbie – after entirely, she has ne'er been much for breaking down gender barriers. Simply and so again, if Mattel unfeignedly intends to work BarbieGirls an "unequaled online play live" for girls, it just might be the best place to start. Either style, I think IT's about time we begin strict a little more from the BarbieGirls of the gambling world.

Sara M. Grimes is a doctoral student in communicating at Neil Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She is besides the source of Gamine Expedition, a web log about children's culture and technology.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/im-a-barbie-girl-in-a-barbiegirls-world/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/im-a-barbie-girl-in-a-barbiegirls-world/