Ever heard of ?dress up games? from your little ones? What are dress up games, by the way? Perhaps you half-imagined the morning or afternoon pastime of younger days gone by, full of lace and frilly clothes plus high heeled shoes? In today's Information Age however, dress up games have come to mean something slightly more complex than games in the play room ? it's currently an Internet phenomenon, in fact.



At the mention of dress up games, what the seemingly homey word evokes are paper dolls. Those dolls usually had a girl for a starting point, and the half-day is spent reading her mind if she minds wearing this or that heavy gown to the ball. The more innovative kid among the gang had figured out long ago how to make additional clothing by tracing the doll through white paper and creating totally new designs.

Before you know it, the paper dolls are now online. A kid needs only a computer and a good internet connection, and voila, hundreds of websites offering dress up games and more that a girl will pore over for hours on end. On each site are dozens and dozens of games that echo every inch of those past days of paper doll making and playing. Each game usually focuses on a certain theme, like for example a Prom, a fashion show, sometimes even a myth-story! Then all that is left to do is to choose items of clothing from the attire menu available to spruce up her online base.

But what makes these sites click among the young? What's good about about the online dress up games is that you can update your range of choices for the games and websites frequently. This is an amazing leap forward from the paper version which was limited to what was within reach.

Some dress up games are so focused and narrowed to a particular setting that they only have a few clothing options. Others are essentially a basic dress-up game, capable of accommodating a rich variety of looks. The same goes for the accessories, of which there are a couple for practically every situation.

There are those thinking that dress up games are nothing more than that, but perhaps they haven't seen the creativity aspect of these online games. Did you know that aside from dress-up, there are also a few more uses for the images of a doll from a dress-up game?

Avatars ? In case some one needs an image for a social networking or a forum profile, you simply need a doll that she you really like, save the file on the desktop or laptop as an image file, and then upload the image to her profile. So no more need to show her own image which is risky, and on the other hand no more showing of the family pet rabbit's face on Facebook.

Story Illustrations ? Why not use the dolls for a story writing test in creativity? A kid-designer out there might only need to write about a mermaid story before realizing a latent writing skill.