I never thought in my life I'd have a reason to sign up for a Barbie MMO -- or indeed, have any reason to have anything to do with the Barbie brand in general. It's obvious that Mattel don't expect any male journalists in their mid-twenties to be signing up for Barbie Girls, as their site is exclusively designed for girls: there are no male characters, it drips with pink, and also sent me an e-mail to let me know that "my daughter" had signed up.

Like many child-orientated worlds the site has several pages of information for parents, and it also quite cleverly includes a "Parent's Place" login, allowing parents to update their daughter’s account settings, including chat level, at any point. Chat levels are important, as like Build-a-Bearville, chat is possible on several levels of freedom. B Chat allows users to select from a list of phrases, Secret B Chat is free chat specifically for girls who own the MP3 devices who are "best friends", and Super B Chat is free chat for players with their parent's permission.

All "free" chat checks words against an internal dictionary and will block any "rude" words.

This is a fairly stringent system, too, as when I began to set up my character, I became confused when it seemed to think that my chosen screen name (GermaineGreer; I was being ironic) was "rude". I guess picking the name of a feminist icon in a Barbie game is kind of rude, but then I discovered it was actually taking issue with the answer to my secret password recovery question -- "Kilmarnock". I'm not sure what is rude about Kilmarnock though. The production of Jonnie Walker?

Anyway, GermaineGreer materialized in Barbie Girls' world as a cute redhead on a blue and yellow dress, thanks to the avatar creator, which has an okay level of customization. It's the first place you notice that V.I.P. members have a much better deal (more hair, clothes and facial options) but I'm sure most players would expect their starting character to be a bit basic.

After that you can set up your room from a few options. The room can serve as a space for private chats between friends, and you can also purchase and place furniture here.

Something interesting comes up quite quickly after you've started playing Barbie Girls however -- and that is that only players who have a V.I.P. membership can purchase anything with their "B Bucks". So while people playing for free can earn currency, they can't spend it (!) so from this point I was stuck with what I began the game with.

That's no reason not to play the games which earn B Bucks, of course. The games include a very cute version of Pipe Dreams featuring hamsters and the usual word searches and match-3 games.

The world itself is very much the usual sort of thing. I don't want to make too many opinion calls in this look (I prefer to wait for the conclusion) so I'll just try and state ambivalently that movement is on a "block-by-block" basis, there isn't a huge deal of animation, and there are a limited amount of locations that are not especially interactive (especially if you can't buy anything.)

There is a cinema, which is kind of interesting (it plays trailers for Barbie movies and short Barbie "webisodes") and the world is actually very busy, with most locations full of players. I didn't find an especially talkative world, however -- perhaps because I managed to make it crash every time I tried to use B Chat. But I'll broach that subject in the conclusion.