Dollz

The Web has become the setting for a new kind of play and dolls have shed a dimension, becoming flat like their paper ancestors. As a sign of the times, they’ve also gained a Gen-Y misspelling and are known now as “dollz” (usually) to their avid collectors. […] Online, where young men tend to attract most of the attention for graphical artistry in video games, Photoshopping and related media, the dollz subculture is a breath of fresh air far apart from the frenzied demimondes of CounterStrike mods or “tourist guy” Photoshop contests.

Stardoll: a ‘dress-up’ or ‘Dollz’ game designed for children aged 9 years and over.

In this framework, typical icons of the Emo subculture are the emo dollz, ie puppets without eyes that feature in the illustrations and in the comic strips filling the pages of the Emo […]

In its origins, it was ostensibly for making dollz, with a z, which are different than dolls with an s. […] The Doll Palace wasn’t the only website that offered dollz; there were people all over the internet who built their own bases and elements that you could incorporate into your designs.

With faster connection speeds came visual chat rooms where users could express their personalities more overtly through graphic avatars, pixel-resolution representations ranging from inanimate objects to cartoonish “dollz,” animals, and abstract swizzles.

There are other meanings of the expression virtual dolls. […] On the internet they are often referred to as dollz to distinguish them from traditional dolls. The hobby has been around since 1995, when dollz were created to use as avatars in the graphic chat programme “The Palace”, […]

She was coming from other virtual worlds like The Palace, a mid-90s graphical chat room (which popularized those customizable Dollz avatars that were all over the internet as glittery GIFs in the 90s) and There, a virtual world where users could make and buy worldbuilding elements using in-game currency purchased with USD.