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Bad, bad "Miss Bimbo" - some moral talk
Media has totally prejudged Miss Bimbo during the last weeks. It is accused not only of causing huge mobile phone bills to teenage users but including a "disorted world view" (Iltalehti 27/3/2008) and being "condemned as lethal" (TimesOnline 25/3/2008). Miss Bimbo is an online game for girls between 9 and 16 concenrating on creating a perfect bimbo character. In Guardian, Aleks Krotoski writes that "the first thing I was struck by when logging into the service was that my bimbo, a looker kitted out only in her white knickers, was already almost a stone overweight. How to cope? By popping diet pills or checking into the plastic surgery clinic, of course".
Goal: to create the coolest, richest and most famous girl
- Is it much worse than to create the most succesfull killer (hurdreds of games) or the best warlord?
Surroundings: a disorted world view
- Are there games with something else?
- Is it really so disorted - isn't the world actually as crazy as the game suggests?
It is really difficult to evaluate the game as I could neither log into it nor reach the site - because, I suppose, it is way too popular at the moment. But as the developers say, it is meant to be ironical. I agree that not all the kids understand the irony, but it may be that a game is an easy way to live through some of the extremely difficult social expectations young girls (and adult women) face.
I am in Denmark at the moment, examining the work of my student at the IT University of Copenhagen tomorrow morning. Her game, Prince$$ of the Hood is about fashion and addresses very similar issues as Miss Bimbo. But, ultimately, the goal of the game is to teach young girls to understand how unimportant looks actually are. This becomes clear through the gameplay as in the end, when a player has reached all the best clothes for her character, her friends do not accept her as such because she is too similar to the others and has "lost her self-respect". So, after the game tells you "Congratulations you now look exactly like everyone else!" - you have already lost the game.
Therefore, I think we should give Miss Bimbo a possibility at least. Based on the supposed goal and some tasks in the game (take plastic surgeries / use diet pills), it is impossible to predict how the actual gameplay will be or how the girls use the game in order to make sense of the expectations they face in their everyday life. In his PhD dissertation Miguel Sicart has written about the games that let the players to choose how to act and to make their own moral choices instead of offering only 'right' possibilities as the most ethical ones.
"Players are moral agents, and they do play a significant role in the moral construction of the game as an ethical experience. This means that players are no more the victims of systems designed to conditioned them and turn them into mindless zombies; players have an ethical understanding of the game, which implies increasing their responsibility in the moral landscape of computer games. Because players are moral agents and do behave as such, games have to take that into consideration, allowing for players to develop their moral judgment in the game experience and through the game community."
If there is a possibility, even a more difficult one to reach, in Miss Bimbo to become succesful and beautiful without plastic surgeries and diet pills, it is the player who may decide between the possibilities. And what are the consequences of being the coolest and most beautiful Miss Bimbo? If it means that you can sit on the backseat of a nice car and shop clothes every day when other people are working in interesting jobs, little girls aren't so stupid that they wouldn't understand which choice may be better in their actual lives.
The bad connotations related to being a bimbo are also quite obvious. Maybe it is only good that it is made clear that cutting your body and aiming to Barbie-like 'beauty' belongs to bimbos interested in sexual appeal, not to people who respect themselves and their bodies. To be honest, during my first weeks in Bristol I was very surprised after seeing the incredible amount of pink girly and soap+gossip magasines available in Britain. I am sure a game like Miss Bimbo does not add much on the overall input girls get from all the media. In addition, I think that it is better to see ultra-sexy game characters in games in which they act like bimbos than in games where thay are superheroes or world savers (compare Lara Croft).
Finally, I think we are much more worried about girls than boys as players. Most little boys play war games, fight with sticks and play with toy guns and many parents find nothing disturbing in it. At least Miss Bimbo is honest and clear: it is far from the cute Playboy Bunny logos in children's clothes, pencils and toys that you can buy in every second bookstore.
posted by: urbnomad at 16:14 |
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