Why Online Dress Up Dolls Constitute The Pinnacle of Gaming
Telling stories has always been one of the primary drives of humanity. The tools we adapt to do that say a lot about where we come from. Video games have always been part of that arsenal, but young girls have another, arguably even more flexible gaming option pushed on them.
There is something pure and untarnished about a character creator screen. The story is there, waiting for you, but it hasn’t taken over yet. You still have ultimate control. Customization options vary, from disappointingly limited to almost terrifyingly broad. Mods exist to make them even greater, to give you more colors, more sliders, more chances to pick the perfect nose, and even more opportunities to put mammary glands on creatures who anatomically should not have them.
There’s a reason so many people love the create-a-sim feature in the Sims game. In-game, characters become hard to control, they have jobs and needs and don’t always play out the story you want them to. Character creation is when opportunities are endless and the power is in your hands, especially when you get custom content in the mix. Sixty shades of eye colour? Don’t mind if I do.
Let us not even discuss the the eyebrow-hair-at-a-time customization of modded versions of Skyrim. Other games which come out with deep character creators built in, like Black Desert Online, are praised extensively for that alone. The need for character customization is real. It’s deep, primal, even.
It’s felt by everyone, including little girls in pigtails, and although they might not be playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, their methods of getting their character creation game on are pretty impressive as well. Let me introduce you to the world of online dress up games.
It may seem excessively pink, and yes, a little Elsa heavy, but some of these games have a surprising amount of punch. I, like many pre-teens with brilliant story ideas and the artistic talent of a snail, gravitated to online dress up games young and every now and then check back in to see what’s cooking. The answer is; a lot.
New games are released regularly, from lots of different sources, and they cover everything from ad heavy princess games, to oddly cleavage beladen but exceptionally customizable anime avatars, to fully functional Lord of the Rings character creators. Many adults can be tempted to call the latter the “quality games”, but the fact is they’re just catering to different audiences. Your Disney Summer Holiday Dressup Game fulfills all the major roles of a character creator. You can customize body, eyes, skin tone, and so forth, then dress them up. There’s even a personality portion where the game assigns a Disney Princess to be “your” best friend. The options are pretty limited, but it’s for five year olds, we don’t want to overwhelm them.
It’s a completely different economy over here in dress up game land. Ads are the overwhelming source of revenue, and on some of the games I played while researching this article there were as many as three or four ads. Most are through Google Adsense, providing some money to the artists, programmers, and webmasters of this mini-economy. On DeviantArt, where I found a few of the original artists after clicking through links, personalized dress up games can be commissioned. Their primary market is other dressup websites, who buy games to “own” and put their logo on, along with the original artists name. These games then get distributed to similar websites who are free to use them, provided they give proper credit. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of competition, audience wise, as the free inter-sharing of games ensures ad revenue is evenly distributed. Websites happily share links to each other, mingle games, and collaborate. If one party has coding skills and the other has artistic talent, an arrangement can be made. Of course, if you want the latest updates or behind the scenes details you can always go to the source sites, giving both parties extra clicks. Other games might as well be produced on a factory line, given their interchangeable faces, keyword filled titles, and sometimes lazy graphics, but even these are shared freely. A small percentage of games try to sell themselves as mobile apps, or, in the cases of some of the more robust software, downloadable computer programs. Some of these might cost money, however you’d find few people coughing up. The dress up game industry, ultimately, is free. Free and clogged with so many advertisements.
I mentioned regular releases. The aptly named dressupgames.com, which I’ve been using for a lot of this research, is one of the better aggregator and creator websites I could find. The ads are unobtrusive, and the games are more developed than the badly designed Minion dress up games you can find elsewhere. Their mission is to update “daily”. According to their website, they have been updating regularly since 1998. Which, fun fact, is the same amount of time that I have been alive. Dressupgames.com is older than some legal adults, and it’s been providing good games to kids all the while.
Other sites that are popular, like AzaleasDolls and DollDivine, also host outside games but are more popular for their home-brewed ones. Both tend to update every few weeks, even if it is just with a game in progress. Adults, it seems, can afford to be more patient.
The age gap presents itself in other ways as well. Sites targeted at younger game consumers can get away with lower quality art, fewer options, and more limited interfaces. Part of this is down to player preference, the sparkles and autoplay music that might annoy older players charm younger ones, while volume of games is favoured over quality in certain circles. However sometimes this gaming community turns toxic, for example a year ago i-Dressup, one of the foremost sites, leaked several million passwords. Again, this is a market aimed at children and teenagers. Its vulnerabilities are striking, and sometimes the distant companies running the larger and more powerful dressup sites don’t respond to calls for feedback. Unlike with other games, there simply isn’t any way to hold the industry accountable, especially not when so many of the games sites offer aren’t even their creations.
There’s a reason most of the older consumers I found tended to flock to more stable ground, individually owned sites where artists and webmasters could be identified and contacted.
Since the overwhelming vibe of all of the sites above- even the most mature ones- is very pink, other options have risen to fill in the testosterone gap. Crisp, clinical avatar makers, or the more macho and complex Hero Machine, are all examples of online dress up games that didn’t want to play with the girls. Still, the roots of the genre remain decidedly in the realm of the young and glittery. Even the more science fiction oriented creators usually start out with female models, an issue that has led to some sites making a dedicated category for “male” dressup games.
It makes sense that demographics would skew in this direction. Historically speaking, girls got handed dolls and expected to make the most of it. Paper dolls, arguably the precursor to the modern dress up game, were a highly gendered toy and even now the emphasis on fashion and makeup present in many of the younger targeted games means that they are primarily going to be consumed by kids who have been raised to value fashion and makeup. However that doesn’t make them useless. They provide a good jumping off point for all sorts of fantasy. As anyone who has played a video game knows, once you create a character you have to love them, at least a little bit. You want to give them a story and without the provided plot of a traditional video game, dress up games force users to make up their own stories instead.
Perhaps most interestingly, dress up games have realized what the rest of the gaming industry has not, that the character creator is where the meat of the matter is. They found their money and they went for it, no plot required. Story is for people who can’t make up their own, and once people have their Dragon Age OCs they are going to start writing fanfic about them anyways. Why not cut out the middleman?
These online delights might look pink and have autoplay music from hell, but make no mistake, they represent the most pared down, elevated version of the games currently available to mankind. Every genre has a character creator, every Disney princess does, most major historically periods do, and so does 1910s fashion icon Erté. Sometimes you’ve just got to get your Romain on.
Options aren’t just limited to people, there are also create-your-own type games for cats, dogs, wolves, and dragons. These vary from simple, to very complex, with the added bonus on non-human anatomy you have to navigate. The ponies, of course, go without saying. There is also one that’s just named Complicated Fish. I’ll let it speak for itself.
In fact, just about everything you can do in famous character creators is available here, with any one of five sleeker and more updated art styles to boot. Superheroes? Check. Fantasy? So many checks. The wars in the stars that we call science fiction? There for you. There are also specific games for various media franchises, including Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Hatsune Miku, and as I’ve already mentioned, Lord of the Rings. The only thing I haven’t been able to find so far are the concerningly well endowed cat girls, and somewhere, someone is definitely working on it.
(Oh, hey, I looked and I actually found one! Modest but a good effort. Never mind guys, regular video games are dead.)
While it might be tempting to dismiss this as “not real gaming” on account of the fact that it rarely has a “win condition” and is often run off of little more than Adobe Flash, I think that would be a disservice to the people who make their careers here and the time and effort that goes into some of these games. Just because it’s open ended and knows what it’s for, doesn’t make it any less fun to all the kids (and adults) out there. Sometimes, gaming is shooting a man in the face. Sometimes gaming is making lines of three ad nauseam until your brain gives up and surrenders blissful nirvana to your quick fingers. Sometimes gaming is dressing up the disney princes in rompers and sending them on their fashionable way.
After writing this article, I’d argue it should always be the third choice. Always and forever. All hail the digital paper dolls; they have realized what seasoned gaming experts have not, that grown men and five year girls alike have a deep, deep need to create a visual representation of their original characters. The adventuring afterwards, whether virtual or just plain imaginary, is fun but optional.
