More Tangible to Digital : Stardoll

Let me just preface the following by saying that I have a 7-year-old girl in my family whom I spend a lot of time with, and it’s not as if I’ve made the discovery of the internet paper doll fad because I’ve made any personal efforts to frequent places trafficked by pre-teen girls. Is that clear? Keen.

The world is going paperless. Environmentally, anything that prevents deforestation is awesome by my count, and having a computer database to catalogue books at work instead of having thousands of index cards is always a bonus.

Not everything, however, should go ‘paperless’. Books, for instance, are now being downloaded and read on flickering digital screens, and even paper playing cards are being cast aside for that most antisocial and dangerous of online activities, internet poker. There is much to be said about certain paper pursuits being palpable, from origami to painting, and yes, paper dolls. I’m not paper doll aficionado, but I presume that at least one aspect of their appeal is folding the little paper tabs around their tiny shoulders until you get bored of their little fashion options, and then making some of your own. It’s a nearly free hobby, if you have any skill with a pencil and scissors and a pad of bristol. It becomes something else ENTIRELY online.

My niece, for the past few weeks, has been preoccupied with Stardoll. It all seemed to be a big, pink, incomprehensible mash of flash animation and superficiality, so I had my wold-wise niece explain it to me. She somehow has an immunity to the color pink, whereas it tends to cripple my brain in any quantity, so she seemed like a good candidate. Stardoll is an online paper doll site where you can clothe your ‘paper’, two-dimensional doll, customize almost all of its features, and even decorate your doll’s 2-bedroom apartment. Because this is online, your display is made available for viewing by anyone who clicks on your profile. They can go in and play with your doll, your outfits, and even rearrange your apartment for fun – though none of these changes by others are permanent.

Unfortunately, none of these things are free, and you can’t simply draw out a new fashion to wear or pretty things to put on your walls. No, you need to purchase everything at the Starmall, using Star Dollars, which can be purchased for about 8 to 10 real-world cents per ‘Dollar’. Many fashions and accessories don’t seem to break the 10 Star Dollar (or one REAL dollar) mark, but it’s clear from clicking around that many participants are paying good, real money to make their Stardoll the fanciest of them all – and because there are over ten million Stardoll users, there’s a lot to see, and the digital collections are significant.

Stardoll places a limit on just how much money you can spend in-game each week (ostensibly to teach a small lesson about economy and smart shopping), but they also spur impulse shopping by placing limits on certain items of clothing or accessories. These are only available in small quantities or for a very limited time, and if you miss them, you can’t even trade for them from another Stardoll. Your digital collection is made limitless by an infinite, scrolling closet, so your clothes collection really has no visible end. My life would be so much more awesome if I had that endless closet space – not only could I display all of my action figures and rotate the visible part of the collection as I pleased, but I’d have a place to dispose of the bodies. Hell, if it was infinite, I could charge to dispose of EVERYONE’S bodies! Knowing me, though, if I accumulated more then three, I’d start to intentionally collect them, and we all know where that ends up. CNN.

Below each Stardoll is a place where the user can type up their own profile to introduce themselves, promote themselves to various statuses, and generally make a mess of things. Because the site is dominated by young girls, expect about 35 fonts per page, and no two consecutive letters to EVER share the same color. The musings of young girls typically follow the ‘I’m prettier than u’ theme, interspersed with a swarm of oddly-placed LOLs and OMGs, and every so often, someone praises Jesus amid their ego-filled bombardments of desecrated English language. Is this a strong argument against letting anyone under the age of 16 touch a computer? Possibly.

The front page greets you with an array of paper dolls made up to look like celebrities – some accurate, some barely even human. You can dress them up, you can save them, and you can have a fun time playing with free paper dolls. I wasn’t convinced of any of this being remotely interesting to me, the average 25-year old male…. and then I saw Conan O’Brien. After one click, I kinda figured that the whole thing was worth a second look.

There are clubs, there are lots of different areas to explore on the site, but the most interesting aspect to me was the prospect of collecting these intangible things, and paying money for things you could never actually touch, or even use in the world outside of the game. Perhaps if you were given the option to print out any fashion you bought so that it might be used on an actual paper doll, I’d be sold on the concept. I’m all about the tangible, whenever possible. Of course, that’s also why I need to leap over things just to get in my door.

It’s not the only example of real-world currency being used to buy digital currency, which is in turn used to buy digital items with no real-world counterpart, but it certainly is the…. pinkest.

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