The reporter, a grown-up lad in a suit, stares at the lap-top screen in front of them. We apologise to any players whom this may inconvenience but we feel in light of this weeks proceedings it is the correct action to take.There is something perverse about this scene: a 23-year- old French lad, Nicolas Jacquart, sits at the kitchen table in his rather dreary little London bedsit, with a CNN reporter at his side. With his eyes set on other countries, “Bimbo” developer Jacquart has bowed only a little to media pressure to alter his site - the homepage now includes the message: “As a result of this rather surprising media attention we have decided to remove the option of purchasing diet pills from the game. It has had a steady increase of traffic since January of this year - reaching 1.2 million players as of late March, but it too is starting to drop off.) (Ma Bimbo has been around since October 2006 and features a less sexualized drawing on the site’s front page. The cash infusion provides players more “Bimbo dollars” to buy things such as breast implants, tanning sessions and pedicures, all in order to make them more popular on the site.Ī Frenchman has already sued “Miss Bimbo’s” French sister site () after his daughter ran up a text message bill of $200. But this time, instead of boys encouraged to use violence in real life (picked up by playing first-person shooter games), girls playing “Miss Bimbo” might internalize the game’s competitive diet-pill popping and plastic surgery.Īlthough it is free to register for and play “Miss Bimbo,” when players run out of virtual currency, they have the option to continue to compete by buying Bimbo text messages at the cost of $2.99. Like so many “kids and video games” stories before it, the gist of the arguments against “Miss Bimbo” was that impressionable young girls might subscribe to the social mores of the game. And others noted that the bare bimbo that a player starts out with is slender, long-legged and dressed in her skivvies. Breast implants to keep one’s pet Bimbo well-endowed ignited further conversation. Of the many charged issues that come with “Miss Bimbo” game play, it seemed that media pundits were most focused on the diet pills available for purchase to keep one’s Bimbo thin (they have since been removed from the game). A post on the “Miss Bimbo” homepage cites “unforeseen worldwide interest” as the reason for the site’s inability to load. At the time of writing this story, the game was inoperable. Traffic has since dipped as the press frenzy has died down. But as the media pounced, with round-the-clock scrutiny of the values the “Miss Bimbo” game espouses, it only helped to double the number of users. As news of the “Miss Bimbo” video game grew like kudzu across news websites and cable TV, so did public awareness about a relatively obscure online gaming site intended for little girls. Why look a gift horse in the mouth, right? Well, it turns out few media outlets did. What news outlet looking to fill a 24/7 news cycle could resist? “Miss Bimbo” had all the right ingredients for a splashy news story: a sensational headline (key word: “bimbo”) a sexy tech angle (online video game) young children potentially at risk (catnip for concerned parents everywhere) and a built-in base of available media commentators (whether gaming experts or women’s groups or media watchdogs). The “Miss Bimbo” story arrived like a gift to newsrooms around the world last week: the perfect illustration of the new lows to which our celebrity-obsessed culture has sunk.
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