Miss Bimbo Online Game Released
Parents Fear Controversial Website Promotes Diets and Breast Surgery
Mar 25, 2008
Both London CNN and the BBC have this week reported on a new online game called Miss Bimbo. The site so far has 200,000 signed up users in Britain and is set to shoot across the world wide web. Especially after the free publicity it is getting thanks to the news reports by the majority of English newspapers this week.
About Miss Bimbo
Miss Bimbo was first launched in France by a 23 year old entrepreneur called Nicholas Jacquart. His business partner Chris Evans is helping him with his UK launch and maintains that it is just a fun game and you can even send your Bimbo to university. The site suffered similar criticisms on its release in France.
Once a player begins they are given a character to dress and control. Like a virtual Barbie doll. They do this by purchasing things with their “Bimbo Dollars”.
What Elements Are People So Concerned about?
The game encourages girls to compete against other girls for the title of “hottest, coolest, most famous bimbo in the world” in a Mean Girls style world.Girls can do this by having plastic surgery, using diet pills and getting sugar daddies to finance their lives.
CNN reports that some of the site's users are as young as seven years old.
To get Bimbo Dollars users are told they will have to “work (gasp) or find a boyfriend to be your sugar daddy...” When contestants run out of Bimbo Dollars they have to add money to their account via Paypal or a $3 dollar text. Players keep their bimbo on their target weight using diet pills and can have breast augmentation.
Parent groups such as Parentkind fear that these kinds of messages encourage superficial qualities such as breast size over less material qualities such as personality. They also fear that in encouraging the Bimbos to remain within a specific idealised body and shape Miss Bimbo is promoting the idea that being different is a bad thing, increasing the opinion in the young and impressionable that anyone not at the perfect weight with the perfect breast size is imperfect
CNN reported that Bill Hibberd, of parents' rights group Parentkind, told The Times the game sends a dangerous message to young girls. He said: "It is one thing if a child recognizes it as a silly and stupid game, but the danger is that a nine-year-old fails to appreciate the irony and sees the Bimbo as a cool role model. Then the game becomes a hazard and a menace."
So whether this is just a natural development in a new technical age from playing with Barbie dolls or a worrying destructive game which will unhealthily influence the views of young girls is yet to be seen. The only thing to be certain of is that Miss Bimbo is just getting started.
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