ONLINE: Cover Girl Lets You Manipulate/Deconstruct the Magazine Cover

[Frank W. Baker]

COVER GIRL is described as a"consumer self-esteem" game designed to expose "how glossy magazines can subtly tweak images for effect and how you shouldn’t always trust what you first see."

Cover Girl has players joining a fictional "ethics-less" media publisher called Glossip Publications, where they're asked to airbrush and manipulate celebrity photographs to push whatever questionable agendas the editors have in mind.

Players are taken through a series of minigames with each image, toying around with simplified version of photo editing tools to get the desired effect -- slimming arms/thighs/stomachs, removing wrinkles under eyes, increasing someone's bust size, etc.

Not all of Cover Girl's minigames involve making a star look better, though -- in one job, users are asked to touch up an image just enough to make a promiscuous celebrity look pregnant, though not so much that the magazine will be sued. Yeah, it's a pretty despicable job!