Undercover Mom in Stardoll, Part 3: A+ for creativity

By Sharon Duke Estroff

As I’ve devoted my last two posts to illuminating the darker sides of Stardoll, I’m going to dedicate today’s entry to spotlighting what I consider to be the site’s crowning glory: its design center.

A few weeks back, while investigating Club Penguin, I described my experience in the pizza parlor, where dozens of kids/penguins pretending to be waiters and waitresses took my order for food that was never delivered. At first, I’d found the scene to be a charming example of virtual pretend play but, the more time I spent in there, the less charming it seemed to be.

When I was a kid, playing “restaurant” meant creating something out of nothing – taking a cardboard box and turning it into an elegantly set table; turning inanimate dolls and stuffed animals into lively customers; creating our own recipes out of random ingredients we’d swiped from the kitchen. I didn't see anything of the sort taking place on Club Penguin. Graphic designers - not kids' imaginations - built the pizzeria, where the extent of children's imaginary play was asking a roomful of already animated penguins what they wanted to eat – and leaving them virtually to starve at the table.

In the Stardoll design center, the scene is quite different. Children can create their own fabrics, choosing from dozens of colors and decorative shapes and adjusting for the size and repetition of the print. They can then use that custom fabric to sew tablecloths, curtains, and rugs, even uniforms for their restaurant staff.

In the scenery design area, kids can create backdrops - themes span from a Parisian café to a creepy castle dungeon - and jazz up the interior with kitschy furniture and accessories (some of these perks require a paid Super Star membership). As in most virtual worlds, including Club Penguin, Stardoll players can also decorate their home spaces with items they’ve “purchased” using the site’s currency.

Another clever Stardoll creative activity is the “Print Your Tee” concept. Kids can select from a dozen or so shirt styles in a rainbow of colors, and personalize them with decorative designs and self-created slogans. With the help of a credit card, the tee can be catapulted across the digital divide and arrive at the real world front door several days later. Yes, it's a ruthless money-making ploy, but a brilliant one, don't you think? Besides, what aspiring designer wouldn’t thrill to the chance to strut her own designs on the school playground? [I am slightly unsettled by the “maternity” shirt style choice, as Stardoll says most of its clientele are girls 7-17.]

Another feather in Stardoll's hat is the personal album feature, which allows kids to compile a portfolio of their design work. In addition to displaying images of their work (some of which require a Super Star membership to save and post), the album also offers creative-writing opps, enabling children to add captions and storylines to their designs.

So if I were to sum up my stint in Stardoll, I’d have to call it a blend of parenting pros and cons - a fast-moving, materialistic, slightly-slutty, anorexic-ish virtual world, where imagination abounds and the potential for creative expression in children is far greater than anything I’ve seen in my undercover travels.

Screenshots

Design your Stardoll's environment too

Design your own fabric (for apparel or décor)

Sewing is part of clothing design

Virtual but (to users) very real Design Center

Design as well as writing opportunities, with the possibility of instant feedback from fellow designers

Stardoll users can also model their clothing designs in real life

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Undercover Mom in Stardoll, Part 2: The skinny on virtual paperdolls

By Sharon Duke Estroff

In case there’s any doubt over which is more fun - trying on real clothes at Bloomingdales or trying on virtual clothes at a Stardoll department store - there shouldn’t be. The latter is the hands-down winner.

Having survived recent bathing suit shopping trauma, I found dressing up MattieLu, my Stardoll avatar, to be a little slice of shopping heaven. Every frock I slipped onto my virtual self accented my many assets. As far as minimizing my bodily flaws, completely unnecessary, as I apparently haven’t any.

When I created MattieLu during my personal Stardoll design process, I was given the option of shaping her frame by choosing body size 1, 2, or 3 - one extreme presumably super skinny and the other more curvaceous. Upper and lower bodies are modified separately so I could theoretically create an apple (heavier on top) or pear (heavier below) framed avatar.

I was fleetingly impressed. Stardoll’s overriding shopping theme may be shamelessly materialistic, its retail offerings, more than slightly slutty, but at least this youth website is cognizant of the importance of building healthy body image in kids. At least it’s doing its part to counteract the counterproductive message (sent children’s way by skeletal tween idols and such) that fame, fortune, and happiness are inversely correlated with body fat index.

Nevertheless first impressions can be short lived. Upon alternating my avatars body type number, I recognized virtually no change whatsoever in her frame. Perhaps that option isn’t right now working, I reasoned.

After much closer inspection, however, I did notice a very slight puffing and unpuffing of MattieLu’s frame with my ascension and descension of number choice. (ee screenshots). Still, if this was the extent of body-type variation advocated by Stardoll, I might as well hibernate for the entirety of bathing suit season.

Does Stardoll’s perfectly proportioned avatars indeed foster unhealthy body image in the young girls who create them? Does its scant, midriff-baring couture encourage excessive dieting?

I think the Stardoll club message boards speak for themselves. (Stardoll members who cyberswear they’re at least 13 years old are allowed to join clubs; each club has its own message board where members post questions, suggestions, and free associative ramblings.) A disproportionate number of posts revolve around topics of physical appearance, weight loss and eating disorders. I came across several dozen clubs that are exclusively devoted to such subjects (see screenshot), but I also came upon weight issue posting in presumably unrelated forums like the “Animal Lovers” club.

Finally, there are sure to be those who argue that Stardoll’s pro-emaciation message is really no different than that of Barbie who’s plagued generations of girls with an impossibly perfect vision of female physical beauty. But as a former Barbie junkie and current concerned mom/undercover Stardoll member, I am going to have to differ on that one. Where there was never any question that Barbie was an inanimate plastic plaything, Stardoll essentially eradicates the line between fantasy and reality, immersing kids in its appearance-obsessed virtual world. As an adult, I intellectually grasped that the Stardoll experience is a product of state of the art computer graphics and technology. Still, I found it difficult to remain impervious to its overriding superficial mindset. On the upside, sampling life as a size 0 did inspire me to dust off my treadmill and lay off the Girl Scout cookies for a while.

MattieLu as a No. 1 body type

But No. 2 isn't that different

MattieLu settles on No. 3

Kelly Osbourne, Stardoll-style

Signs of anorexia

Scary advice on a Stardoll message board

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.

Undercover Mom in Stardoll, Part 1: Barbie grows up

By Sharon Duke Estroff

Despite my kids’ insistence that I never tell a soul, I’m spilling the truth anyway - I played with Barbies until at least my 13th birthday. And most of my friends did too. We’d spend entire Saturday nights primping our dolls for hot dates with Ken, and showcasing our collections of tiny plastic shoes as if they were precious gems. Now, nearly three decades later, I’m still a girly girl at heart. So it seemed only natural to tap Stardoll.com - a wildly popular “virtual paperdoll community” with nearly 30 million members - as the site of my next Undercover Mom investigation.

Stardoll.com Day 1

It's not that I expected a full-fledged reunion with my old plastic pal. I knew that Stardoll would be its own girl. But I was admittedly stunned by the very grown-up feel of this fashionable virtual world. While I’d pictured Stardolls to be some kind of Barbie/Bratz/Sailor Moon cyberfusion, they were in a different league, altogether.

Unlike the wide-eyed whimsical avatars of many children’s websites, Stardoll avatars seem plucked from the pages of Vogue magazine - sophisticated and edgy; sexy and cool. There are male Stardolls too: some grungy and goateed, others bearing resemblance to Adam Lambert, the metrosexual American Idol contestant - all sporting six-packs and come-hither looks. Sure, Barbie has been criticized for her impossibly perfect proportions and Bratz for their defiant, rebellious streak, but they still manage to maintain a playful childlike quality that is decidedly missing from Stardoll.com.

Puzzled, I began to question my assumption that Stardoll is a Web site for children. Maybe it’s really designed for middle-aged moms wishing to be 20-somethings with too much time on their hands. But then I noticed the SpongeBob SquarePants and Littlest Pet Shop ads flanking the Stardoll homepage and the “about us” page stating that most Stardoll members are girls 7-17, and I second-guessed no more.

Mom Break: In the marketing world it's known as the KGOY (Kids Getting Older Younger). You’ll find it on the racks of stores like Justice (formerly Limited Too) that sell padded bras for 6-year-olds, at the local cinema where 8-year-olds pile in to see Twilight, and in Barbie’s transformation from middle-school staple to toddler toy.
And you’ll find evidence of KGOY in every nook and cranny of Stardoll.com – from the distinctly adult-looking avatars to the mature designer clothes to the sophisticated loft living spaces.

But the silver lining is that Stardoll has made playing with dolls beyond kindergarten once again socially acceptable for 21st-century kids. The same girls who swapped their dolls for cellphones to be cool (but secretly would have traded their last wireless minute for a chance to put on a bona fide Barbie fashion show) can now save face while dressing the Avril Lavigne Stardoll for an imaginary concert or designing a punk-rock prom dress for their grungy avatar. Yes, glaringly imperfect as it might be, Stardoll has in its own way returned a few embers of Girlhood Past to the KGOY generation.

Screenshots

Oh so sophisticated avatars

Decidedly grown-up 7-year-old

"Ken," Stardoll-style

To go "goth"

Very fashionable physicist

Jonas Brothers as Stardolls

For an index of the complete Undercover Mom series to date, please click here.