The highest grossing movie last year was Barbie, in part propelled by Barbenheimer, and aided by the excellent performances of the cast and the virality of its soundtrack. It was rewarded with two acting Oscar noms (and a lot of controversy around the lack of a third), plus another two for Best Original Song. That all helped, sure. But mostly, people just really like Barbie. She’s the world’s most iconic toy, and while some find her frivolous, she means a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a bunch of Barbie clothing and merch myself. But I don’t have a Barbie video game, and I realised recently that I’d really quite like one.
Barbie has a ton of video games in her history. Unfortunately, most of the early Barbie games just use her as a facsimile for femininity. Her games revolve almost exclusively around dressing up or brushing horses, and barely characterise her at all. Even her animated movies, though way less complex than Greta Gerwig’s version, do much more with Barbie’s personality.
A Brief History of Barbie Video Games
My desire for a Barbie game was spurred by one such game. While she no longer gets video games, not even cheaply made generic dress up sims, she still gets mobile releases. Sure, mobile games are video games too but you get my point. These games suffer from the same problem they always have – they want to make money by selling video games to girls, but have no respect for or appreciation of what girls and women want, so you get the jingling keys of bright pink colours and blonde hair with no substance.
Of course, it’s easy to argue that Barbie herself has no substance. She is just a doll, and her personality is whatever the hand holding her decides it is as it waves her up and down and simulates her voice as she jumps in her pink Corvette. She is a children’s toy, and one that has long been negatively associated with unattainable body standards, sexualised outfits, and reinforcing an anti-feminist view of women. But Barbie can’t be both – she can’t simultaneously stand for nothing while also representing everything wrong with the depiction of women in media.
This is why I found the Barbie movie to be so clever, though both fans of the movie and its deepest critics seemed to miss parts of why. Barbie does not present women as perfect and men as stupid, nor does it say you should just forget your troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream. A central point of Barbie (if a heavy-handed one) was that women can be beautiful and love pink and sparkly things as well as being fiercely intelligent, but also that shielding yourself from the world by only caring about partying and nail polish leaves you open to manipulation and dulls your critical thinking skills.
Do None Of These Barbies Have Video Game Potential?
It was never that women are great and that men stink, or even (as many took it as) that you should just put on your best dress and be yourself. It was that you can embrace femininity unashamedly and still achieve great things, but you shouldn’t let yourself live frivolously just because people say feminine things are frivolous.
How does this translate into a video game? I have no idea. It’s not the sort of movie you can adapt directly, and aside from dressing up and riding horses, there’s little in either Gerwig’s Barbieland or the wider Barbie mythos that is screaming out to be gamified. I’ve written before about wanting a Disney Princess game for the more action-oriented heroes like Elsa, Mulan, or Raya that plays a little like Tomb Raider, but that would not suit Barbie either.
It’s just a little odd that Barbie has had 60 video games since her first in 1984, and only a handful are even memorable (with fewer still worth playing). You might say that many failed attempts point to her unsuitability to the medium, but it seems more like a failure on video games’ behalf to have 60 attempts with one of the most iconic characters in the world and rely solely on the most generic interpretations of what Barbie is about.
I don’t have a pitch for a Barbie game. I don’t have a ‘just do X but with Barbie’ or a ‘take this Barbie thing and make it a game’ the way I usually do when I write these sorts of articles. I just want a good Barbie game. It was the most popular movie of the year, somebody somewhere must have an idea, right? If there’s a Barbie kart racer announced soon I guess you can blame that on me.
