I am going to analyze the game of Toontown, the first MMOG designed for encouraging the kids' social cooperation by Disney. It's hard to use Bartle's topology to understand how the game is played. Based on the description from the authors of the game (Mine et al., 2003), "socializer" is the major type of play that's encouraged by the game design; "explorer" is also encouraged by the design based on Panda3D, an open-source 3D game engine that supports platform-agnostic scene graph and distributed storytelling; Players can become an "achiever" by the quests between Toons (players) and cogs (pesky businesslike robots) and many mini-games embedded in the game. But "killer" (doing things to other players without consent) is discouraged by the game design. The purpose of the game is to create a "safe interface" for kids older than 7 years old.
There are both educational and entertainmental purposes for ToonTown. The major motivation of the game is to encourage the cooperative play. Different from MMOG for adults, the audience of Toontown are mostly kids, who are at the position of vulnerable population, requiring more protection. In the paper of Taylor (2003 a), she focused on the perspective of designers, and discussed how the issue of identity and social responsibility is embedded by designers. She thinks that there is trade-off between the freedom of identity and social responsibility; persistent identity can help build a reputation system in the game. In the case of Toontown, designers plays a major role of defining the rules to make the game to be a safe place to play. For example, one design choice is to use the drop-down menu for conversation instead of open conversation. This is a trade-off between the freedom of communication and the safe online environment for children, and the latter weighs more in the design concern. Open conversation only happens under the protection of password between "secret friends". Compared to the constraints of conversation between players, the cooperation is made very easy. A Toon can join a quest simply by standing close to the quest. In mini-games, the players can join the same game by taking the same "trolley". Toontown designers plays an important role in creating the safe and fun space for kids to play by carefully designing the game mechanism. Another perspective to analyze identity is from the player(s), which is discussed in Pearce's paper (Pearce, 2006). Like many Disney products, bad guys can be defeated eventually. Toons can almost always beat the cogs as long as they are working together; even if the toons lose, they do not die, they go to the playground to heal. The choice of avatar is cartoonish and harmless: dog, cat, horse, duck, mouse, rabbit, monkey, bear and pig. For kids and teens, it's especially interesting to find how the identity in the online world forms while they are still on-the-way to explore, change and develope their identity in the real world. One piece of research that I found online is that, Toontown was highly praised to have "A more responsible conceptualisation of what it means to have a friend in social software". Instead of encouraging kids and teens to make friends as a contest, the friend making mechanism in Toontown corresponds with the existing research that "teens have no real interest in talking to strangers".
Another feature about the game is that it is designed for parents and kids play together. The design principle for the game is "simple but not stupid" to attract audience that have different preferences and flavors. One specific design is to encourage "newbies" and "elders" to play together. Elders are explicitly rewarded for helping newbies fight with cogs. During the quest, cogs tend to attack the higher-level players. According to findings about baby boomer gamers (Pearce, 2008), helping newbies is mentioned as the second favorable type of play, making it more fun for parents to play with their children. It would be interesting to conduct qualitative study about how this game is played among families as what Pearce did in her paper, finding the dynamics of family life around game play.
Although Toontown was designed for kids and families, theres actually a fairly large adult toontown player community which set up secret friends and largely group together or do cog raids on the VP, CFO or CJ otherwise players have to use the clumsy but safe speedchat function whilst it marginely works. And this population likes the more challenging game play, such as such as the powerful combination of lure + trap gags, which requires more advanced teamwork than battling together. But for players who target for self-improvement and less into cooperative play, the game received a lot negative comments. One of them is that the game max out itself in three months, after that there is no room for improvment for the characters except winning more jellybeans (which is the resource in Toontown). The positive and negative comments shows that how the vision of the designers directly influences the game experience, and selects the audiences of the game.
MR Mine, J Shochet, R Hughston (2003), Building a massively multiplayer game for the million: Disney's Toontown Online, Computers in Entertainment (CIE), ACM Press
F Romeo (2004), Y'know, for kids! Social software for children, Unpublished paper presented at O’Reilly Emerging Technology
Pearce, C. (2006). Communities of Play: The
Social Construction of Identity in Persistent Online Game Worlds. Second
Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media. Noah Wardrip-Fruin
and Pat Harrigan (eds) Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Pearce, C. (2008). The Truth About Baby Boomer
Gamers. Games & Culture, Vol 3, Issue 2
Taylor, T.L. (2003 A). "Intentional Bodies: Virtual Environments and the Designers Who Shape Them." International Journal of Engineering Education 19, no. 1.
Taylor, T.L. (2003 B). "Multiple Pleasures: Women and Online Gaming," Convergence, Vol. 9, No.1, 21-46, Spring 2003.
Yan Xu, yxu7@gatech.edu
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