Everybody wants happy users

When searching on ’responsibility cyber bullying’ almost all hits concern the schools’ responsibility in this. E-mail, sms and personal homepages have eased being bad to each other. Teachers, parents and school have a tough time raising kids to humanitarian citizens.

When working with Stardoll, we’ve seen this as a part of the responsibility to run a community, as well as a demand from the users. We early decided we wanted our members to leave the site ever day in a comfortable and even empowered mood. A bullied girl is not feeling empowered.

When inheriting 200 dolls and 200 000 member pages from Liisa, I spent many months parallel developing the game and hours in customer service. It stood clear from day one that there was a subculture of girls who liked girls who was not combinable with most teens and tweens from all over the world. Only their names made me blush and both their language and missionary were not appreciated by most other users. We erased these kind of accounts again and again and again until they accepted that this was no longer a place that they could use for their purpose (might sound harsh, I hope they have their community somewhere else where everyone feel comfortable and are happy with this, maybe even get empowered by it).

Next question was not as evident. We could clearly see from the user input that American tweens were much more sensitive to foul language than most others. With their background they did not let one little ‘shit’ pass and they reported everything. By our Swedish standard I guess we found these kids a little policiere and prudent. When translating the site to several languages we implemented a strict language filter that doesn’t let any bad words through. When releasing this feature we had to take a stand – what words did Stardoll accept and not? Would older and European users find the conversation too childish and boring if they weren’t able to write even the tiniest little ‘shit’? We considered that if half of our users didn’t feel comfortable with this language, we had to try to ‘raise’ the rest to accept this. We never had ANY comment or disapproval of the strict language filter.

One of the conceptual values we worked by when developing the site thereafter was ‘Safety’ (later Haven). The girls should be safe to be on Stardoll. Safe to be girls. Safe to try out their style, personality, social interaction, creativity and more. Safe to be online in a big community.

The members also kind of raise each other, they let others know what is ok and not, but to get there the community have to set the right premises. In every decision – in everything from sales, design, banner production, conversion layers and in all communications with the members - we weight in the value concept of Safety. Doing this the entirety will come as close the the ideal goal as possible. Example of details where the Safety value makes big difference is

- Categories available for report. Presenting specific categories for the users to report each other in gives a hint of what is accepted and not.

- No personal information is aloud. Both language filters and categories for report informs of this. All reports are followed up.

- Only winners are presented, other voting results are not visible for anyone. It’s not empowering to get bad votes on something you have put lots of effort on, and it’s an obvious trigger for others to pick on you. The trigger ‘to win – to become covergirl’ is the only that matters, internal hierarchies are not necessary for a great game.

- The copy in a banner is changed from - ‘Everyone is pretty on Stardoll’ to ‘Be who you want on Stardoll’.

- No real life images of members are allowed as they would completely destroy the possibility to try out different personalities without being bullied. The game would be ruined.

- There are space for 30 Best Friends in the presentation, not only one. If only filling in one, the empty spaces look kind of... empty.

- Despite user requests we don't publish a bold Britney Spears when there is something that doesn't seem sound.

- Keep at least one gift free for everyone to give to anyone and encourage to send this gift to newbies and others. This gift must thereby be very general and maybe even be a trigger to start a conversation.

At rare occations when this value has been compromised, when prioritizing something else before the Safety, there has appeared leaks where cyber bullying has found its way. If there is only a tiny chance that a feature might lead to attempts to cyber bullying, it will. It’s a choice – a safer, maybe little less challenging/fun/selling version of the feature to avoid an overall negative experience.

This kind of ‘leaks’ must then be followed up and contraproduced. We run a Best Friends Forever campaign. In the first step we encouraged the members to suggest how to be a good friend on Stardoll. We put 10 of the great suggestions together to a code of conduct and for ten days 200 000 girls returned every day to sign under each of the bullits. The campaign was hugely appreciated and the bad tone we had experienced was calmed – for some time…

I guess what I’m saying is - parents, teachers and users – tell the people behind the features what you want! Don’t work against cyber bullying on your own, but take the producers to your help. They have great opportunities to make impact, to reach out.

Girls’ Games IV – tweens and teens today are same same but different

We adored Madonna, today there is Lady Gaga. The through all times eternal icon for all girls of any kind is Marilyn Monroe – these are the women who are sexy and thereby adored by men, but who still keep the power over themselves and turn the worship to their own profit. This is why big busted Lara Croft worked well also for women even if her breast size was debated.

We found inspiration in future heroes Princess Leia, Ripley and E.T. Today’s girls get inspired by mystic Bella Swan, Arven and Avatar. I’d say the only difference is that in the 80s space was the mystery – the future, today the Twilight zone is what we long for – a place we don’t know anything about and therefore can have promising hopes for.


TV provided us with Pamela Barnes Ewing, Sammy Jo Carrington and Melissa Channing. Today it’s Hannah Montana, Lauren Conrad and Sara Sidle(CSI) and many more. In the 80s the grown up intrigues were showing us how normal we were in our real lives. Today someone else’s strange real lives are telling us how boring we are in our real lives.


We wore Levi’s, Converse and biker tights. Today’s girls dream of Chanel, Miss Sixty and Louis Vuitton. The economy is kind of different and the kindness of the parents has grown.


We screamed after Michael Jackson, Kiss and a little later on Public Enemy. Girls today have a wider selection and much younger, almost peers to follow. Some of the faves are Tokio Hotel, Robert Pattinsson, Zac Efron, Jonas Brothers, McFly.


So the habits are the same while there are minor differences in economy, lifestyle and male icons. What differs is of course the standard access to Internet, mobiles and games.

Most remarkable is probably the mobile phone use. 54% of all am teens text daily and sends and receives 50 or more messages per day – 1500 per month! 14-17 year old girls are the most active texters, sending 100 or more messages per day.

Next is that girls play games. 97% of all American kids and more than half of American adults play often. The NPD Group report “Gamer Segmentation 2009,” says that 28% of females are playing video games (40% of all players). But not all female gamers are young. More than 33% of women ages 18 and up play video games – surpassing the 18% of boys ages 17 and younger who play video games.

With Stardoll’s 60 million members there is no doubt that girls like and spend time on online fashion games, if they are designed the right way. A majority of the girls on Stardoll are 11-12 years old.

Stardoll was specifically designed for these young girls – those who had left their Barbies and who started to turn to the grown up world for the first time. It was designed to be a free pass from school yards’ peer pressure and from impossible media dreams. It’s a place where girls know they are welcome, where they are safe to be girls. It’s a place where they can explore their growing personalities and try out both looks and social behavior without worries, restrictions or risk taking. They can’t do anything wrong, their creations are always right, they are right.

But it is also those who still have the time, and who is still more in an experimental world of play. Around the age of 15 these girls are turning to the real world for real life practice. They almost don’t play computer games at all.
What they practice on and offline is self marketing – to be seen. They blog and participate in social networks to promote themselves. They do absolutely use Facebook or other social networks, but not as often as those age 25-45 years old. They don’t need to, they see their friends much more often than we oldies do.

Overall the media time spent is not that different!
8-18 years old spend 32% of their media time on TV, 25% on their computer and 20% on their mobile phone. Consoles only take 5% of their time, partly due to that it’s not a multimediatasking activity. Both TV and videogames are decreasing the older the teenager get, while music takes more and more of their time. Style, music and friends make the identity.





Going back to my own teenage head I guess girls run about the same kind of mental life today. Friends and media are the only things that matters. Popularity and being seen is in focus and most girls don’t have time for games between school, sports and friends as soon as they are free to go and do where/whatever they want.

all stats are found here

Previous Girls' Games Posts
1980-1984
Kids 2010
1984-1994

Let's Create! Pottery app

I'd say Polish Infinity Dreams had a female gamer in their mind when developing this great iPad app.

It's great looking, full of extra graphic elements that make me happy. It's not just to create your potter, but also to see polaroids of them, to sell them and to buy new beautyful patterns to decorate them further. It's the full dream, not only a small part of it made because someone discovered the technical possibility.

Introduction and pushing me further in the game play is made through a fake e-mail conversation with the game that encourages me to take step after step, just the way I'd like to be involved in any social community with too many details to learn at first visit. I learn it at the time I'm ready.

Also it's not crucial that my copy gets identical with the suggested original. I don't have to start over, and I don't loose anything. It's fun just to create, and I get rewarded with money to buy new patterns for if I can make it identical. This is probably one of the issues that is the most female friendly feature.

More about girls' games later...

Full summary from toucharcade.com
Let's Create! Potter in iTunes store

Girls’ Games III – 1984-1994

In 1984 I was eleven and games had become quite male gendered, but I didn’t really notice. At that time all we wanted was to have fun together. We watched videos at home or hung out in the park and made all old school pranks we could come up with. The first ‘date’ was a gang of us going to see Splash and the next we went to the Tivoli, always with our parents in the background. They kind of supported us to do fun stuff together in a demi freedom.



This absence of problems soon turned to something very complex and confusing – the teenage. The old classmates went out of status as we changed school and the run for the top started. The top equaled being popular and seen, preferable by everyone. There was no self analysis or strategy in that plan, only thoughtless action. And the peer pressure was heavy. Everyone did their best to sit on everybody they could sit on to reach higher status. It was all about doing things nobody else dared and about doing things everybody else did - rebelling from parents, school, teachers and old friends – embracing new friends and media. Brands, style and music were some of the very important details to get right.


In the late 80s the supermodels were the most unreachable goal every girl aimed for. Elle McPherson, Paulina Porizkova, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington were later run over by even more unattainable Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campell and Kate Moss. http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f96/supermodels-1980s-35456.html I scanned every magazine, knew every Stockholm based model and even today I know every image from these times by heart. They almost feel like old friends of mine when I see them today. The girls with contracts were admired by everyone. My doubtlessly biggest focus was not to get a boyfriend, it was to lose some weight. I was 100% convinced that that would do my success in all ways.

The goals were clear: to be popular, to be seen

The method was: to lose weight and become a supermodel



During ‘college’ years the girls started to work weekends to earn extra money to save. The boys did not in the same extent for some reason, maybe they trusted everything to solve by itself, maybe they were always saved by parents when needed?
Everyone was going to the gym, solarium and spent a lot of time on their hair. Things were more relaxed and the hunt for popularity in school was not at all as intense. Studies, work and a few selected friends and gossiping occupied all our time. We played board games, went to discos and parties and baked a cake in the afternoons. We never watched TV, at most an hour between school and homework. Games did not exist. To the girls.

But the boys played all along though we didn’t know. Or rather – we did know, but we were that uninterested that we didn’t even hear them talking about it. It was something they did by themselves or boys only and probably didn’t talk about not to be a bore to the girls.

I realized this when I met my first boyfriend (I was very late on this, more interested in myself than in boys as said before) and a console was a natural part of his apartment even though he wasn’t a big gamer. I had no fear though and outplayed him frequently. I didn’t last for very long there. I'd say that both he and his friends had no problem with the girls playing though, rather that they were not going to change their interest for any girl and almost forced us to play if we were going to hang out.

On the arcades I felt a little more mal placé. Those places were dark, uncozy and non social. Not very girly in any way.

Finally, in the university, Internet, e-mail and mobiles appeared!!! The two first were easy to adopt. No more did we have to run around all libraries to find the information we were looking for, and no more did we have to send letters by snail mail to our abroad friends.

The mobile phones took some time though to approach. They were no very user friendly to begin with and many girls hesitated to use them when it went ok as it did, but finally we did and no more we have to get up early in the weekend mornings to not miss everyone before they were out of their homes.

So what’s the same and where are the differences in teens’ habits today? To be continued…

Previous posts on Girls' Games
Girls' Games I - 1980-1984
Girls' Games II - kids 2010

Girls' Games II - 2010

In 2010 7-10 years old boys play football and/or hockey. Girls too, 'it’s so good with team sports'. Then girls also do the gymnastics, ride horses and dance. No boys do that. Obviously it’s not considered important for the future.

Girls’ and boys’ outfits are more clearly separated both in colors and styles than back in the 80s, and the toys provided are still different according to current gender. Girls play with Littlest Pets and boys with Star Wars dolls, sorry figures, and Pokemon collectibles. Barbies are often passé already by 7. The ‘throw ball on the wall’ game has completely vanished. There were of course little commercialism in that, and no status gained.



But even though girls and boys seldom mix, the love games appear in the same age as before, around 7 or 8, and offer opportunities to spend some time together. Otherwise it’s only in computer games that I see girls and boys unite.

Today the computer experience starts a lot earlier though. Seven years ago we played on Disney.com with our one year old daughter. Today our youngest boy’s first words in the morning are ‘I want to play the veggies’ (veggie samurai for iPad).

My girls and their girl friends join at someone’s place playing Indiana Jones or Wii , and iPet. The family favourite is Little Big Planet. The girls spend most of their gaming time customizing their sackboy while dad is running the game forward.


The girls also play online. I’d say none of their male friends would ever join in the favourites girlsgogames or Stardoll, but otherwise it’s both online and by the consoles that they and their class mates find a common interest that today is gender neutral. The girls sit in the phone with Eliot and Linn while playing Panfu. They suddenly spend a couple of hours at the boy next door – playing Star Wars – a game they would not choose themselves, but that is fun enough and the console itself is not a problem.

Somewhat we’re back to the start of the games. I’d say many children don’t see the games, computers and consoles as male gendered. They don’t see them as techniques or machines, but as media for entertainment. They are not afraid to handle a joystick, even though I admit that the girls still want to watch for a while before trying a game, while the boys just jump into the game giving it what it takes.

Why this has changed lately? Both computers and consoles have become a standard in our life style? Lots of dads (and some moms) keep buying new consoles and want their kids to play too? Computers are both tools, entertainment and communication today?

I know I generalize a lot. Also there are more local preferences today as the supply is much wider than 30 years ago (at least in Sweden who has shifted from a social state to a capitalistic model), but I have also run communication with millions of girls word wide for the last 5 years, why I believe there is some truth in these generalizations.

There are some stronger separations in real life toys and spare time occupations than 30 years ago though and there are yet not many games that are built for girls by girls, or even for boys and girls, by girls. And why don’t women play as much in the middle of their lives and returning stronger than men later on. And what do the girls find so great about the sackboy? To be continued…

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Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

Girls' Games I - 1980-1984

I'm thinking about girls' games, why and what they are, and I begin here today with my own experiences of games, friends and what we played back then around 1980-1984.

Me and a friend went to see a movie on our own for the first time when we were about seven. We choose Star Wars. Soon after dad returned from the States with a Star Wars printed long sleeved t-shirt for me. I wore it every day. It made me kind of interesting and in and Princess Leia in the front of the image was radiant.

Star Wars was a big thing by then. The boys in class did nothing but played with Star Wars dolls (for boys called figures, for girls dolls), while the girls had absolutely no interest in spacecrafts’ heavy artillery down the sandbox, resulting in explosions throwing the dolls, sorry figures, in all directions. We were lining up for ‘throwing ball at the wall’, where the rules were clear and everybody waited for their turn. Conflicts were by that easy to solve through discussions, and no pell-mell necessary. A few of the guys were sometimes jumping in.


About the same time most of us got a Game & Watch. I got some strange copy from dad when he came home from Asia. There was also a digital watch including a plane bombing game that gained me some status amongst my classmates.

Neither Star Wars or these first games had any gender tags by then. They were marketed as family entertainment.


A couple of years later the talented boys (these later on, not very cool guys) in class started to focus on Dungeons and Dragons, as well as designing road and water maps on checked paper. The girls at that time were lining up for jumping twist with rubber strings, waiting for our turn, following the rules. Sometimes we tried to adopt the guys’ interests as football and marbles just to get some time spent together, but most of all we enjoyed the mixed teams hunting each other down on the meandering backyards. Actually when thinking about it, the same guys sometimes jumped in on the rubber strings and also preferred the mixed team hunts.

A guy in our class got an Atari console. We used to gather at his place to race with cars. The girls tried it. The guys had absolutely no problem with that, and they did not in any way try to exclude us, and yet we weren’t that interested, only for shorter pauses in more interesting real life interactions. Soon all boys had a console at home. None of the girls did. I guess also the parents found car racings and war games more proper for young boys than for the girls.

As I remember it the girls and the boys had different interests of their own as well as mixing up and trying out each others' games. The theme of the console games did by time not match the girls' interests at all why the games became a boys' thing.

To be continued...

Art inspiring to art

Now I get it - my fascination for 3D and art getting inspired by eachother. Julian Meagher is here showing me that it is more about art inspiring to art that is the interesting thing about it.

4 Previous posts on art inspired by art

Digital inspried oil canvases

Again a wonderful oil on canvas inspired by the digital formats. Hand made is appreciated mostly by the time put on something easy to make fast kind of. By Maurizio Bongiovanni. More to see on my fave design site Koi koi.

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