Online paper doll game Doll War was a time capsule of early internet culture

I wasn’t really a fashion-focused tween, but I spent a lot of time in the mid-aughts looking for paper doll games that I could use to create my original characters. This is how I must have stumbled upon my hobby. Doll WarA competitive online game in which players create, dress, and then submit their dolls to other players for voting on the best.

I wasn’t very good at the game. One barrier was my lack of interest with clothes. The game was also unbalanced, and complex. To buy clothes, you would need two currencies. Fame can be earned by other people visiting your profile. For a nobody like me, that didn’t happen.

Maybe wanting to get my name out there for Fame is what first took me to the site’s forums. This was my very first Internet community, which ended up becoming a complete crash course for online living.

Because I clearly remember the 13-year old saying to me that nobody has a real life before they become teenagers, I am certain that this is what I knew when I was 12. It was enough to offend me that it is something I remember as a 28 year old. Other, more mundane things are also recalled. In a very real sense, the forum helped me learn how to communicate textually with strangers. I could understand them without needing to know the details of their speech or body language. I also used the forums to communicate with strangers, and creative writing was a part of that conversation. I have never made my OCs happy. Doll War’s actual game — I didn’t have the Fame for that — but there were writing prompts in the forum I could use to explore the characters.

Forum games, fandom, and interpersonal grievances were all topics I was interested in. Before I joined a forum, I was able to learn how to lurk and get the feel of the community. And I got to be a cringy tween somewhere online where my face and name weren’t attached, something that seems much rarer today.

The Debates subforum was created. Although I now know why the Debates subforum existed, it was not something that I had in mind. The Wayback Machine doesn’t archive a lot of the forums, but in one snapshot the latest post is called “illigal immagrants [sic] Volume 2.” I can’t read it, but I’m positive nothing good happened in there.

A particular thread existed on the Debates forum. It was called, approximately, “Do you think bisexuals exist?” I had no idea what a bisexual was, but not only did I learn, someone had also bluntly commented something along the lines of “Yes. Source: I am one.” Unfortunately, I failed to think about why this thread stuck in my brain so much for upwards of five years, but I like to think that the straightforward acceptance that bi people exist and you can just be one still helped me out in the end.

Doll WarThe forum was closed in 2008. However, according to the Wayback Machine, it had approximately 450,000 members at the time of the last Wayback machine capture. It is possible that not everyone would have received their internet education. But it’s not hard to imagine that many young girls with their first sense of freedom and exploration handed to them online would have looked for a dress-up game and ended up having a similar experience to the one I had.

Und noch Doll WarThere is not a single mention of it on the Internet. Google only returns a handful of threads of comments from parents concerned about the doll’s skinniness, and the defenses provided by pretenders to be grownups. Access to some of the website, though not all, can be made via the Internet Archive. It wasn’t big enough to get a dedicated nostalgia community like Neopets or Club Penguin or various Tumblr subcultures. A few people tweet, “Remember Doll War?” But the answer is mostly no.

Another similar website Diva ChixIt seems that, was created after a spinoff Doll War closed. However, it is still in existence with less members. Doll War2008 Although it has forums, they are very few. Most subforums have gathered only a few posts even though they’ve been open for more than a decade. There are only two posts in the Debates section, one in 2016 and one in 2021. Nobody is learning about bisexuality here.

That’s not inherently negative. Online and offline, queerness is more common than ever. Kids are likely past questioning whether bisexuality exists. On the whole, it’s probably better that 12-year-olds aren’t going looking for dress-up games and ending up reading about “illigal immagrants.” But newer platforms like TikTok bring their own challenges, with algorithms deciding what we see and being much less anonymous than forums.

Even though it was not necessarily better, the experience of learning more about the internet through a website for paper dolls with dress-up was one that can only be experienced once in web history. My digital identity was between that of a digital native and an immigrant. Along with that shift in timeline, platforms and communities have evolved, leaving behind forums and their unique introduction powers.

It’s a difference that leaves me nostalgic, and with the earlier internet’s ongoing speedy decay, it’s not even a nostalgia that can be scratched by searching through the Doll War forum archives. However, it lives on in people’s memories.

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