Understanding Dress Up Games

Y ou might have heard the term tossed around by your daughter and her friends, but what is a dress up game? Is it the kind of game you remember from your childhood with outdated clothes and your mother’s shoes? It can be, but in today’s online world, dress up games are much more than actually playing dress up in the play room – it’s a huge online phenomenon.

Dress Up Games
When you think about dress up games, your best reference would be the paper dolls of your youth. Those dolls had an attractive base, or girl, dressed in underwear or a swimsuit, and you dressed her in various outfits provided in the same set. If you were truly adventurous, you might make additional clothing by tracing the doll through white paper and creating your own designs.

Today, those paper dolls have moved online. Your daughter can sit at the computer and pull up one of hundreds of dress up game websites. On each site she’ll find dozens, if not hundreds, of games similar to the paper dolls you knew so well. Each game usually centers around a particular theme, perhaps Prom or Celebrities. Then she will simply select clothing items from the multitude available to dress her online base.

Modern Day Paper Dolls
The best thing about the online dress up games is the ability to update the games and websites frequently. Your paper version was limited to what came in the set. Your daughter’s modern paper dolls are limited only to what the designers fell like creating on a particular day.

Some dress up games are highly specialized and have only a few clothing options, while others have a more broad categorization and can accommodate thousands of looks. The accessories alone are dazzling.

Using Dress Up Games
So what are the dolls used for, you wonder? In the same fashion as your own dolls, the games are simply fun for girls who enjoy fashion and playing dress up. Of course, with the internet being what it is, there are additional uses for the dolls as well.

Avatars – There are so many social websites available that creating a doll specifically for a certain website or forum is easy. Your daughter might simply create a doll that she really likes, save her to the computer as an image file, and then upload the doll to her profile the same way she would a picture of herself. This is actually one of the safest ways to show an image on any profile.

Story Illustrations – Girls who enjoy playing dress up are most likely creative at heart, so they might use the dolls as a basis for a story. Perhaps a young designer creates a mermaid according to her specifications. Then she can print out the mermaid or save and import her into a word processing program. Then the mermaid creates the perfect illustration and inspiration for the story.