At 12, I was wild-tongued, hairy-legged, and oblivious to my vapid wardrobe of children’s department store fashion. Hunching unsupervised over my first iPod in 2013, I downloaded social media with the same rambunctious curiosity I had for everything, soon realizing I could access communities who understood me as I hadn’t been understood. It was a bright and beguiling revelation born in the universal experiences of Just Girly Things, the relatable iconography of rage comics, and the shameless ramblings of fandom forums. As discussion boards, comment threads, and image captions taught me a new language of self-expression, I began molding my identity to a new dynamic—that of watching and being watched.
This mutual scrutiny didn’t belong to the internet I once knew. It was a den of play, independent and unobserved, where I pandered to no one’s expectations but my own. Propped on a swivel chair in the family office, I found it through browser games on my parents’ PowerBook, circa 2010. Websites like EverythingGirl.com and GirlsGoGames.com were gateways to digital girlhood—radiating hot pink and electric purple, crammed with feminine trigger words like fashion and makeover,and pixelated Barbies waiting to be clothed and accessorized as if sprawled on my bedroom floor. Here, I could express my preferences without the threat of external judgment. Here, it was just me and my dolls.
Imprints of this childhood ritual are stamped across history. Dated to the 1600s, miniature portraits sometimes contained translucent overlays of costumes, hand-painted to dress the figures inside. Little girls started cutting paper dolls and dresses out of magazines in the 19th and 20th centuries, reflecting the ideal wardrobes of womanhood their culture glorified. In 1991, the downloadable manga dolls of Japan’s Kisekae Set System finally took dress-up to a digital plane before Mattel’s CD-based Barbie Fashion Designer sparked thegirlification of the Western video game market. For many Millennials and Zillennials raised in cyberspace, the browser-based dress-up game became a formative experience, the act of dragging and dropping outfits onto virtual models a rehearsal of the choices they would make for themselves. Then Adobe Flash Player’s end of life made classic games unplayable, and social media began replacing them as a child’s first encounter with the internet. But much like their historical counterparts, emerging generations still harbor a desire for self-expression. In response, the dress-up game has reinvented itself free from overbearing beauty standards and stereotype-stained corporate marketing. Independently crafted by digital artists, new gaming websites now offer players an expression of identity more authentic and unrestrained than their online and offline realities.
The dress-up games of my childhood reflected wardrobe choices just as homogenous and marketable as they were experimental and imaginative. If the game developers weren’t selling a toy, they were selling an expectation of femininity, the benchmarks being ruffled miniskirts, itty-bitty handbags, and chest-length hair curled into soft waves. For some, this picture was the truest manifestation of themselves. But my discovery of personal styling unfurled within these limits, not without. On websites now defunct and unrecognizable, I restyled Polly Pocket as a petite rockstar wielding a pink guitar. I took the dolls from Mattel’s now-retired toy line My Scene to hairdressers and nail salons for heavy makeovers. I changed from pink to blue the dresses of Rapunzel, Odette, and Clara from Barbie’s archaically-animated-yet-enchantingly-told films. Despite their commercial boundaries, I found them fulfilling, enriching, and addictive—perhaps because they allowed me to make choices “congruent with idealized views of the self” and encounter “abilities and satisfactions that are difficult to access in everyday life,” as Nurist Surayya and Djoko Setyabudi wrote in their 2016 paper, “The Significance of Playing Dress Up Games on Children’s Materialism.”1 This experience intensified as I carved a click path to other sites hosting outfit-makers for models, princesses, and brides, reveling in the retail paradise of Spil Games’s Shopaholic series or curating runway collections for Ubisoft’s browser-based iterations of Imagine: Fashion Designer. My preferences burst forth as I chose mermaid cuts over bob cuts and layered skirts over low-slung jeans. But was I aligning myself with the media’s definition of beauty, or did I simply pick what I liked?
As an adult with hindsight and a fashion sense just as nebulous as that of my child self, I still don’t know the answer to that. All I can pull into focus is the inexplicable euphoria of piecing together romantic and out-of-reach couture—a feeling like infection from the same brain-rot now sending Gen Z and Gen Alpha to the runway on Roblox’s notorious styling game, Dress to Impress. Even if I rationalize this feeling, is it still free of external influence? Interviewing tween girls about their engagement with digital paper dolls in 2013, Giovanna Mascheroni and Francesca Pasquali found they enjoyed learning to match clothes and colors in the construction of their ideal selves, later suggesting that these games “provide a toolkit for managing identities and experimenting with patterns of adult femininity since they socialise young girls to the codes of dressing up and putting on make up.”2 Although players expressed agency over their gender identity when they clicked through a game, their style choices were made in the vacuum of a consumer culture intent on conforming and sexualizing them.3 Of course, dress-up games were never exclusive to tween girls. Regardless of age or gender, players could substitute the digital dolls for themselves, safely adorning new identities as forms of experimentation in ways similar to costume play at conventions and festivals.4 But these experiments took place on pink-soaked websites where, more often than not, a singular expression of femininity was all we had to play with.
Resisting such conventional beauty standards throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, hobbyists soon offered alternatives with exquisitely drawn games that were rich in research and storytelling, appearing on sites like DressUpGames.com, AzaleasDolls.com and DollDivine.com. Artist, web developer, and game designer Ola Rogula was one of the early visionaries. She grew up playing with paper dolls in Communist-controlled Poland before her family moved to Canada, introducing her to digital dress-up games and web design shortly thereafter. Making games with early iterations of Adobe Flash, she posted avatar- and animal-creators on her website Divot Design, which became the stalwart and highly esteemed Doll Divine in 2008. Soon enough, the site began to populate with mythical, historical, and story-based dolls of hers and other artists, a hobby-turned-career that emerged from the joys of escaping into fantastical worlds, as I found out when I spoke to her earlier this year.
“My philosophy has always been to make the games that I want to play,” she said. “I have no interest in a game where I drag one of four outfits. I like to feel like I’m putting together a beautiful artwork, piece by piece, so I make sure that my games have the pieces to craft that experience.”
When an autonomous artist holds the digital stylus, the scope of these pieces is boundless. From the play of light and shadow on different skin tones to the length, texture, and color of hair, Ola explained the meticulous creation of diverse physical features for her dolls—a process as loving as it is laborious.
“When I started to make games, I was one of the first people to make a conscious effort to include a wide variety of skin tones,” she said. “Many games would have, like, four options, but they were all shades of Caucasian, and usually the other facial features wouldn’t even work with the tan option.”
Here at last was a game developer who hung up mirrors for all identities, letting players twist preference, body type, gender, culture, and ethnicity into kaleidoscopic patterns. Inclusivity remained a priority in Ola’s work as she adapted to the mercurial demands of technology, translating her software from a dying Adobe Flash to the unofficial emulator Ruffle, and soon recognizing the need for a dress-up game tool accessible to artists who lacked the programming skills to merge art with code. Launching the template-based website Meiker.io in 2019, Ola empowered creators and players to remake the dress-up game with reflections of themselves they could recognize.
But she wasn’t the first. Just as they activated the electronic evolution of paper dolls, Japanese programmers revolutionized the dress-up game community with user-friendly creation tools. Released by TetraChroma as a website in December 2018 and reconfigured as an app in July 2024, Picrew.me is now an abundant wardrobe for dress-up where artists can upload the components of their doll-makers into streamlined frameworks. Creators and players alike have devoted themselves to the tool since inception, amassing a link-sharing subreddit, a filterable database of games or ‘Picrews,’ and inundating social media with avatars of themselves or their characters. I remember when games crowded my feed on Tumblr and Twitter/X as playable microtrends; my dormant addiction to dress-up reawakened as if I’d opened an old box forgotten in my garage only to find my childhood Barbie dolls stacked inside. Six years on, Picrew exists in a microcosm where chronically online young people overlap with artists, writers, and fans hyper-fixating on characters in their fandoms. They craft authentic avatars and show them off in elongated image threads, wielding exhaustive and unorthodox dress-up options to express gender-non-conforming and queer identity; to visualize their favorite and original characters; and to reimagine themselves in absurd and whimsical forms—think Crocs, cockroaches, and fuzzy worms.
However, it’s the artists who express themselves first in the design of eclectic shape and style options—from vitiligo, bodily scarring, and prosthetic limbs, to hair textures and head coverings, to meme-emblazoned shirts and eccentric jewelry. Speaking to creators like Mandy (@ummmmandy), Poika (@poi.ka), and Eli Nova (@hellosunnycore), whose projects stretch across Picrew, Meiker, and Doll Divine, I realized that their elaborate artistry had established game creation as an artform itself. Refining the theme; sketching and coloring hundreds of items on digital software; mastering the parts, items, and layers on the Picrew Creator tool—each step in the process is an art style explored, an ability stretched, or imagination made real. Poika told me how experimenting with dress-up games transformed her practice, opening doors to collaborate with teams behind Meiker and Dress Up Games. Once she brainstorms a theme, she trawls Pinterest and flips through fashion magazines for visual inspiration and accuracy before drawing up pieces that match in all combinations to accommodate all tastes. “This includes keeping a strict color palette and user-testing each item to make sure they don’t clash,” she said. “When every single element works together seamlessly, it makes it a lot more fun to play and opens up heaps of options.”
As a child, Mandy said she found it difficult to connect with conventionally beautiful doll-makers of the past. Now she delights in contemporary dress-up games that fall outside and in between traditional binaries, an artistic approach that she’s taken in her own doll-makers. “Often the doll base in Picrew games reads more gender neutral, and I find that gives people a lot more variety to play around with,” she said. “With Picrew, you’re more able to recreate a realperson, not just a magazine-perfect version of someone.
“I want people to be able to see themselves if that’s how they like playing these games,” she went on to say. “I never want people to feel alienated or overlooked. I’ve gotten comments before that people were able to make something that looks like themselves in a dress-up game for the first time in their life, and that is incredibly meaningful to me.”
But what about players who can’t find features to reflect their identity? Can we condense the infinite measure of human experience down to a handful of outfits in a digital catalog? Should we? On a technical level, the task proves impossible. As Eli explained to me, Picrew places limits on the number of layers, items, and color swatches available to artists, requiring sacrifices.
“A Picrewcan only have at most 750 different items,” they said. “Could you distill the world’s population into 750 unique features, including moles, body parts, hairstyles, clothes, and everything else that makes people unique? Of course not.
“There is a lot of joy in making a game that allows a lot of users to feel seen and represented when they play. But the more basic human features you include, the more unique and whimsical items you have to leave out—which means you’re limiting both your own and your players’ creativity, and as a result, limiting everyone’s ability to express themselves in more interesting ways.”
When Eli released their first dress-up game, sushicore! アイコンメーカー!, on Picrew in 2020, players reached out with joyful gratitude for the plethora of options available, allowing them to create the most accurate versions of themselves or their characters. Crammed with unconventional eye shapes and irises, six categories for hair styling, and four categories for layering outfits alongside headwear, neckwear, jewelry, and handheld accessories, it was considered one of the most inclusive character-makers on the site. But despite this impressive range, some players wanted more. Creators like Eli often receive complaints about poor representation in their games, a concern routinely echoed across online spaces in the dress-up game community—encouraging at best and entitled at worst, targeting specific games for lack of options, and expecting artists to meet impossible standards of diversity.
“People forget that when you demand inclusivity and representation from a single creator, you’re indirectly asking them to represent a lot of people who they would not normally be in a position to speak for,” Eli said.
“Rather than demanding every Picrew to be something that appeals to everyone, I think it is more productive and more healthy to encourage more artists to make Picrews and to support the ones that are more niche but cater to an audience that is less frequently catered to. The more people that make them, the more you are going to see representation and variety in the community.”
As of February 2025 a scroll through the search engine catalogs of Picrew and Meiker reveals a combined total of 12,338 games, rising exponentially as creators deliver their projects with themes and art styles that surpass imagination. Now, players are spoiled for choice. Whether they’re experimenting with new looks or adopting their avatars as personas for their social media presence, the value of these websites as vehicles for self-actualization cannot be underestimated. This kind of virtual existence allows young people to safely express facets of identity they often can’t live out in physical communities, giving them another space where they can “build social resilience in ways that correspond to their personal preferences and needs.”5 It’s a cosplay of the self. It’s a rehearsal before the curtains come up. It’s a magical girl transformation, all glowing mist and airborne spinning and sparkly costume upgrades included.
When the satisfaction of the game has worn off, players deserve to embody that change unapologetically. Authenticity is a dauntingly visible choice to make, with or without the veneer of social media to protect us. Often, the perspectives we use to curate ourselves for the expectations of family, friends, and strangers filter out how we really look. But the dress-up game has always lacked spectators, letting us try on outfits we’d never considered bringing home or simply shoved to the back of the wardrobe. And if we can honor our identity in a code-based changeroom, perhaps we can then clothe ourselves in the courage to transform what’s simulated into what’s real—whether we’re being watched or not.
Works Cited
1. Surayya, N & Setyabudi, D 2016, “The Significance of Playing Dress Up Games on Children’s Materialism,” The European Journal of Social & Behavioural Sciences, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 154-169, doi:10.15405/ejsbs.188.
2. Mascheroni, G & Pasquali, F 2013, “Dress Up and What Else? Girls’ Online Gaming, Media Cultures and Consumer Culture,” CM – casopis za upravljanje komuniciranjem, vol. 8, no. 29, pp. 79-102, doi:10.5937/comman1329079M.
3. Ibid.
4. Fron, J, Fullerton, T, Ford Morie, J & Pearce, C, 2007, “Playing Dress-Up: Costumes, Roleplay and Imagination,” thesis, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=131d13916ba062717e45efea0a5e81b4bd372830.
5. Gopffarth, J, Jablonsky, R & Richardson, C, 2022, “Building Resilient Futures in the Virtual Everyday: Virtual Worlds and the Social Resilience of Teens During COVID-19.” Resilience: Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, Felix Meritis, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 9-12 October 2022,pp. 117-136.
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