It Took Me 7 Months to Give Girls' Fashion Shoot a Chance, but I'm Glad I Did

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

When Girls' Fashion Shoot was initially released last fall, I remember being intrigued... And wary. With a name that uninspired (along with the fact that physical preordered copies came with a baggy of plastic rhinestones as a bonus) it was easy to imagine there wouldn't be much to it. The trailer made its way around a handful of gaming sites, sometimes presented with a bit of editorial snark, but little seemed to come of it. It released with a pop and a fizzle. I assumed that meant it was as bad as I thought.

I was wrong.

The original Japanese version of the game is called Nicola after a fashion magazine known for its up-and-coming models, and in that context the North American name Girls' Fashion Shoot seems particularly lackluster. When I eventually picked it up on sale I played all of ten minutes before moving on. I regretted the purchase immediately, and only opened Girls' Fashion Shoot for the second time (just last week) to get my money's worth and alleviate my gaming guilt. It was at that point that I got so sucked in that I've barely played any other game since.

Compared to the relatively well regarded Style Savvy series which combines dress-up gameplay with a solid customer service simulation, Girls' Fashion Shoot certainly seems like it could be more of the same pink-box girl-oriented gaming dreck that both male and female gamers love to look down on. There's a reason my dad would never let me rent that Barbie game for our Sega Genesis, and I learned it when my teenage "rebellion" lead me down the roads of both Super Nintendo emulation and bland dress-up gaming. The history of girly games is often one of patronizing shovelware dividing the market. Society already makes it easy to equate girliness with weakness/inferiority, but when it comes to girly games it's even easier.

Girls' Fashion Shoot may not have the meat on its bones that Style Savvy does (nor the character diversity), but there's still something there. You focus on building outfits, posing for pictures, and then laying out and decorating editorial shots (Purikura-style) for a magazine. You also apply to take part in ad campaigns, go on-location for shoots, and hang out with fellow models. The vast majority of your play time will be consumed with making outfits and arranging page layouts, a deceptively simple mechanic in which there are seemingly endless possibilities. It's a highly creative kind of gameplay, but also relies on developing a much more contemplative "routine," similar to what draws me to the Harvest Moon franchise time and again.

I would say I love a nice satin ruffle or piece of supremely feminine lace about as much as I love lining up the perfect headshot on some alien jerk, but I still have a hard time shaking my wariness of girly games. Even when I do find myself enjoying (and sharing my enjoyment of) something like Girls' Fashion Shoot, I worry about how that enjoyment will affect how other people see me -- that they'll recoil from my girly game germs. And sometimes they do. But the fact remains that there's a time and a place for a good girly game, and we often just need to force ourselves to remember as much.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.</

Comments

[Guni Greenstein]

You might want to check this out, backed by no other than our own Anshe Chung:
http://www.megirl.com/

[Arcadia Codesmith]

At this point in history, I think any game that only focuses on half of the potential audience is deliberately handicapping itself. That definitely goes for fashion/style games that have no content for males.