About Dress Up Games

For anyone developing web content the big question is always; What do they want? Well, once thing I know for sure is that when it comes to dress-up games, dressing up two girls is always better than dressing up one! The recently released Slumber Party dress-up game from Puter Dolls is a huge hit. Not only is it the second most popular game on both of my sites in the last seven days (after Maya’s Fashion Show) but the girls are spending a lot of time playing it! So dress-up games developers, please make more group games!

I wanted to do something more with the girls in Shopping in the City so I decided to do a game with one of them, Maya! In this one she’s modeling her own fashion line! I’m very happy with the outcome and the response has been great.

Picture credit: Maya Fashion Show at Dress Up Games

By popular demand, the former food dress-up category on Dress Up Games is now cooking games. From now on, it will have links to design cakes, make your own pizza and all those types of games. I’m not totally decided on those compete with time cooking games. I know they’re popular and they are fun, but I still like the idea of Dress Up Games being all about creative, relaxing games where there is no time pressure and no-one telling you what and how to do things. We’ll see…

Picture credit: Highlights Kids

Now that the weather is finally getting warmer here in Iceland I thought what better way to celebrate than making a category for summer dress up games? Not that I mind winter, I like winter and fall is my favorite season. What’s not to like with the beautiful colors, crisp cool weather and Halloween and Christmas only a few months away! But yeah, I was supposed to be excited about summer hmmm…

Picture credit: DollzBliss

Sometimes I ask myself who these people are who are marketing dress-up games to young girls like the young girls are what? Teenage boys? Or maybe it’s the marketers/web owners who are teenage boys and just don’t get it? Today I came across a game with the delightful title Need to try hard! After a title like this the explanation went on the read “want to dress up and ugly lady to be a pretty girl. You should try hard and contribute all talents to complete this job.” Nice.

This is funny and you can’t help but laugh at the whole cluelessness of it all but it is sad that girls, our daughters, will actually come across crap like this. Oh and by the way, the game itself which had been harvested from another site had nothing to do with this “need to try hard” theme and you can judge her ugliness from the picture!

I just made a new category on Dress Up Games,  a list of large websites with their own dress-up games.  How cool is it that there are now lots of websites developing their own games? I’ve been trying to remember what was the very first dress-up game I found ten years ago when I started collecting them, I think it was a cute, little ballerina paper doll made in shockwave like most of them were back then. All very pink and it had music. It was only online for a little while and it was the first of very many games I’ve been sad to see taken offline over the years.

I knew about this site of course but I haven’t really reviewed it with any serious intention of linking to it. I don’t understand why anyone would choose this name for a tween/teen site and I think it’s totally inappropriate. If the audience is old enough to understand how “owning” derogatory terms can be empowering, fine, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I just got back from the UK where I found out the bad press Miss Bimbo’s been facing in the last week. It seems that one of the things Miss Bimbo users can do to make their “bimbos” look good is using diet pills and the owner compared Bimbo players to Paris Hilton. I have to say, I’m not surprised that parents were outraged! The site has apologized for the Paris Hilton comparison and have because of “surprising media attention” decided to remove the diet pill buying option. No apologies about that however.

I’ve been removing a lot of links from dressupgames.com that are really more aimed at preschoolers. I thought about registering dressupgamesjr.com and collecting games for kids under 6, but I’m afraid I won’t have time to do it properly. I hope someone goes in that direction, there’s definitely a market,  simple dress-up games are great for kids learning to use a mouse.

I had the honor of being interviewed by Beacon Street Girls. I’m grateful for the opportunity to talk about dress up games, my big passion, so a big thanks to BSG for the interview!

Yep, it was in March 1998 when after having bookmarked over 30 virtual paper dolls I decided that that would be the object of my new website, having wanted to make one for a while! I definitely want to make the anniversary year special and I think that the best way to make it a happy occasion for both me and (other) dress-up games fans is adding new games to Puter Dolls and Dress Up Games. That is a new twist by the way, until now Dress Up Games has been a directory only. I’ve been quite busy designing new games this years and so far I’ve worked with very talented designers to make these games:

1. Glamorous Shopping in the City, a fun dress-up game with a shopping theme.

2. Fun and upbeat DJ Darby, dress her for a dj gig in a funky dance club.

3. Smart and mysterious Feline Catgirl Detective, who fights crime and looks sharp doing it!

Besides these exclusive games I’ve also had three gift games from other websites, Chinese Princess and Toy store from Nummyz.com and Dune Buggy Designer from Car Titans. Very productive two and a half months!