Kim Kardashian has a video game. Yep, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is a cellphone app game, like Candy Crush or Fruit Ninja, that kids can while away their time on. Oh, and while this little gaming trinket is free to download, it’s on its way to bringing in a reported $200 million ($85 mil of which is said to go to Ms. K herself).
What’s the game about? Well, it lets young players see what it might be like to become a big celebrity, just like Kim did. (Without the sex tape, of course.)
Gamers create a pretty young avatar who just happens to work in an Los Angeles boutique and just happens to have the good fortune of helping Kim herself out of a last-minute fashion jam. From there it’s simply a matter of following in the royal Kimmer’s wake. Your character accepts a friendly invite to a photo shoot, starts rubbing elbows with the right movers and shakers, begins her own modeling career and finally leaves her former schlubiness behind to become an A-list sort, worthy of a Kardashian’s company.
“You clearly have talent,” the in-game Kim tells us. But we’re quickly taught that the only “talent” that success really requires is being pretty, knowing which hand to put on which hip, dating the right people and finding the right fashion look. And that last part is where the game rakes in its cash.
Players can get tiny bits of in-game cash by performing simple actions, or they can spend real money in exchange for big bundles of in-game moola. A mere hundred real dollars will amass a fortune of $175,000 of game payola. And with the game’s clothing prices, you’ll need it. You kids do want to be stars, right?
So insidious is the game that Time’s Charlotte Alter compares Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to Dante’s Inferno. And while Alter’s tongue is planted firmly in cheek, she does have a point:
There’s no way to get through the game without committing one of the seven deadly sins at almost every possible junction. You go out of your way to humiliate your enemy, Willow Pape (Wrath.) You’re always trying to be as famous as Kim (Envy) and you’ve got an eye on your next big publicity stunt (Pride.) After the first level, you never go back to work at “So Chic,” (Sloth) and dollar bills appear every time you check your makeup (Greed.) We all know what your manager means when he tells you to “keep your head down — or up…or wherever the photographers want it!” (Lust.) The only sin you don’t commit on the long journey from D-list tag-along to A-list star is Gluttony, because this is Los Angeles, after all.
Now, some may look at this gaming bauble and see it as innocuous nonsense. But I think that’s the problem with our current celebutant- and reality TV-driven culture: Most of it is a bunch of contrived, repetitive and witless nonsense. Yet with snacks in hand we glue our collective backsides to the couch and watch or play it. Our kids and teens are sucking it up, too. And they’re not necessarily seeing just how foolish it all is.
Listen, I’m sure that Kim Kardashian is a very nice person. But I worry that when young people play games like this or watch Kardashians spend magically appearing fortunes on uber-expensive fashion, some kind of wish that smile-for-the-camera existence could be theirs too. One U.K. woman even went so far as to spend $30,000 on plastic surgery to reshape herself in the image of the worshipped Kim K. in hopes of getting the same kind of attention.
That’s more than silly and more than sad. Let’s face it, this kind of stuff, and the media machine that drives it, can be flat-out harmful.
Yes, I know that the business of celebrity worship and the lures of Hollywood fame have been around for ages. And they’ve always been pretty nonsensical and potentially destructive to the young and pliable. But at least in days of yore when young people wandered out looking for instant stardom at a corner Schwab’s drugstore, they knew they’d have to work up their acting or singing chops to get it. That’s not required with this new brand. All you have to do is … be.
In a 2012 theguardian.com article, author Emma Brockes asked Ms. Kardashian about being famous for, well, pretty much doing nothing, and she got this response:
‘When I hear people say [what are you famous for?], I want to say, what are you talking about?’ she says slowly, her eyes wide as a bushbaby’s. ‘I have a hit TV show. We’ve shot more episodes than I Love Lucy! We’ve been on the air longer than The Andy Griffith Show! I mean, these are iconic shows, so it blows my mind when people say that.’
In the article, Kim Kardashian also IDed her typical fan as “a younger girl, like 15 or 16, who loves fashion, loves to be a girly girl, loves beauty, glam.” And she also noted that she respects these girls as a “backwards projection of herself.” So it’s no stretch, I guess, to figure that these backwards projections are likely the ones Kim and her gamemakers believe will be playing, learning from, and paying for her little cellphone game.
Will they also long to follow in her footsteps? For the sake of future generations, I can only hope not.
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