You are blinded with a bold neon pink font littered with stars and bows bringing back the nostalgia of princesses and unicorns. Tapping your fingers as you wait in the lobby for the next theme to load, your heart is racing. When you finally get the theme, reading “Red Devil of the Week”, all hell breaks loose. 

During lunch, you and your friends almost always open your phones to scroll your apps. Usually drawn to Instagram, Youtube or Tiktok, today is different. Today you open Roblox. Roblox is cluttered with options for games, but only one caught your eyes. Dress to Impress.

Scrambling for your life, you feel the intensity and anticipation of creating a showstopper outfit. Ironic for the lowkey nature of the theme. As soon as you put the finishing touches on your devilish outfit, you strike a pose on the runway choosing from an array of numbered poses. For a game about fashion, hair, makeup, stars, bows and pink, it brings out on your competitive side that urges you to climb the podium to stardom and “Pose 28” on all the excuses of outfits you defeated. 

Dress to Impress, as you soon come to realize, is addictive, entertaining and inspiring. It took over your time so much that the 50 minutes of your lunch period are completely gone. Sandwich uneaten and undefeated, but you’re content as can be, as getting first place all rounds would boost anyone’s ego.

Dress to Impress is a competitive fashion game on Roblox where players are given a theme and a base character. Based on that theme, they decorate and dress themselves in five minutes to then show off their creation on a runway. Players get to vote on others’ outfits at the end. Getting the most stars results in getting on the podium and gaining points. 

Released November 2023, Dress to Impress has quickly skyrocketed in popularity, with about  250,000+ people active on it at any given time, according to the New York Times. Dress to Impress took home three awards alone at the Roblox Innovation Awards: Best Creative Direction, Best New Experience, and Buildermen Choice of Excellence. Additionally, mainstream celebrities, such as Charlie XCX (creator of “brat summer” trend), have collaborated with Roblox to release brat-themed outfits and clothes. It’s no surprise that this surge in popularity has influenced many teengers and young adults to gravitate towards this game. 

“It’s really fun to get new themes and dress up, and experiment with different types of clothes. Like layering them differently, with different colors. Thinking outside the box makes it really fun,” said Zara Kidwai, junior.

Though the platform Roblox is catered to a younger audience as a whole, Dress to Impress specifically is getting a teenage audience and is a “popular fashion game [which] has adults…paying attention,” according to the New York Times. One can see this in real time by scrolling through their TikTok For You page, Youtube recommended, or simply looking around the lunch room. 

“I would see people like influencers play it and the funny topics and memes from [the game], and I thought it would be so funny to try that too,” said Aanika Gandhi, sophomore. 

While some decide to stream it on Twitch, a live streaming broadcast platform, many influencers decide to put their clips on TikTok or Youtube, drawing many more people to play the game as well.

“It’s on my TikTok For You page a lot, I see it everywhere. So I decided to play it with my friends,” Kidwai said.

The wide range of games on Roblox is typically for all ages, but some are not necessarily catered towards the teenage demographic. Such as the game Fashion Famous introduced in 2016 when most of Gen Z was still in elementary school or middle school. Fashion Famous was much like Dress to Impress today and gained popularity during the years. 

“I used to play Fashion Famous when I was 6-8 years old, and when I play Dress to Impress [DTI], it brings me back to my childhood,” said Ziara Gavin, sophomore. 

Though the two games are similar in terms of gameplay, people lean towards Dress to Impress more because of a larger range of fashion options that make the game fundamentally different and, as some believe, better. 

“I still play Fashion Famous and it’s kind of the same game, with the same stuff,” Gandhi said. “But Dress to Impress has clothes based on what high schoolers and adults would wear, while Fashion Famous has simpler, kind of kiddish clothes. Dress to Impress has a better style of clothing.”

The more fashion forward and creative outfit options seems to be the main draw for many. 

“I like Dress to Impress [better] because they give a lot of clothing options and the bodies are more realistic,” Gavin said. 

DTI has model-like avatars as well as more realistic bodies for females and males, unlike the regular blocky Roblox avatar featured in Fashion Famous and on other Roblox games. 

Along with influencers and the creative, fashionable outfits, nostalgia from Fashion Famous seems to be another large driving factor for the DTI surge.

“I used to play Fashion Famous when I was younger so I’m happy this kind of game came back and is popular now. That’s kind of why I like playing DTI,” Kidwai said. “[Highschoolers] like it because it’s nostalgic. And it’s a fun concept to judge other people’s outfits, especially when we’re older now.”

While Fashion Famous came out in December of 2016 and has 2.3 billion plays as of September 2024, Dress to Impress counters with 2.8 billion visits in less than a year, as it came out in November of 2023. The rate at which users have gravitated to Dress to Impress shows its popularity. 

The nostalgia of playing the competitive fashion game Fashion Famous could be a factor of why people gravitate towards this newer competitive fashion game, DTI.

“There’s something called ‘rosy retrospection’, that when we look back in time, we often look at it with a rosier picture, thinking it’s even better than it actually was,” said Jeanne Donaldson, psychology teacher. 

Along with nostalgia, dopamine plays a large part in the rise of video games, especially one like DTI.

“Video games have different appeals and they can be used in different ways. As far as dopamine goes, there’s a lot of research into the reward activities that dopamine gives a shot of [a] reward to the brain,” Donaldson said.  “The teenage brain is more sensitive to dopamine than the adult brain.” 

Something that’s rewarding, such as video games, creates more dopamine which makes people feel good and want to play the game more.

All video games give shots of dopamine, but the easy and competitive gameplay of Dress to Impress, the colors, the trendy ideas and the graphics make the game especially addictive to teenagers.

Perhaps that’s why some teenagers in the lunchroom choose to devote their time to Roblox instead of eating their lunch. 

The glory of winning, knowing that everyone acknowledges the hard work, sweat, tears and your Red Devil fire you put into your outfit echoes throughout the day encouraging you to strut down the hallways.