Assignment 5: World Design
Now, being an avid Disney fan, I was extremely excited when I realized what Toon Town was: you play as a toon in Mickey’s Toon Town and run around, defeating evil cogs that are trying to bring it down. The premise is about what I would expect from a game aimed at a younger audience, but I was disappointed with the game overall. Now, one can argue that this was because it was a child’s game, and that is why I didn’t like it, but I believe that the flaws with it are much deeper. In fact, there are several children’s games that I love. However, my biggest complaint is in the world design because of the lack of real multiplayer aspects of socialization.
Having gone to Disneyland at least once a year since I was five years old, I have had the luxury of witnessing the birth of Toon Town at Disneyland, upon which the game is based. Walking around in the real Toon Town, I cannot help but escape to my childhood and remember all the great Disney cartoons of old and feel a part of a magical fantasy land. Logging into the game, I got a very superficial sense of what Toon Town was. When I ran around, it certainly looked like the Toon Town I know and love, but the depth of character was missing. I believe this really was due to a failure of two of the three themes presented by Taylor which can be related to poor social features in the game.
The first theme is immersion. Immersion as Taylor defines it is one of people and interacting with them, forgetting all about the real world and being drawn into the virtual world by dealing with other players. Toon Town had no immersion to draw me in. Sure, I created my character, and I was proud to walk around, but when I played for a few minutes, I felt more enticed by what was going on in real life (like my laundry) then being drawn into the game. The primary factor for this was the real lack of character interaction. Perhaps it was because the game caters to a younger audience, but I had virtually no interaction with other players. I fought alongside a few, played a few games with one, but I never really chatted with any one. And as I walked around, I noticed that no one else was chatting either. I will touch on this subject later.
The second theme is identity and social responsibility. As I played my character, I did not feel an attachment to my character. In every other MMOG that I have played, I have felt very attached to my character, even after first creating him or her. However, I did not get that connection predominantly because I felt that everyone else looked just like me. I had trouble telling who was who. The names also did not help as they often seemed convoluted and haphazard. In a sense it adds to the world since toons are supposed to be wacky, crazy, and unorganized, but I caught myself not wanting to read names because they just weren’t memorable, and it didn’t matter. I felt no sense of identity and no link with my toon.
The third theme is legitimacy. Legitimacy according to Taylor means that what a player does is legitimized by being actually coded by the programmers, such as a sense of gender or race as defined in the game programming. Legitimacy was the one theme that I felt Toon Town embraced. I felt that the characters were appropriate for the game as was the design and world layout. It felt authentic and deliberate, though a bit lacking in diversity.
As I said earlier, the main drawback was the lack of social interaction. For being a MMOG, it felt like a single player game with other people occasionally coming to help me in battle that soon left after word. I feel that this is a major flaw on the part of the programmers who should have tried to program in more interactivity. First off, in the trial version (so you can play without subscribing), the player can only say a few phrases. I understand why they would do this to encourage people to join, but I feel it really hindered my game play and made me not want to continue playing. Second, there is no incentive to interact with other players; all items are bought from NPCs, the multiplayer games are not very interactive, and even tough fights can usually be won single handedly.
Taylor makes a point to focus on the fact that everything in the game was put there by choice: every object, every land, and every piece of a character is there because a programmer decided to add it. I believe the programmers did a great job in capturing the superficial feel of Toon Town with this game, but I believe they failed in the social interaction portion. Thus, if more was added to enhance and encourage player socialization, Toon Town could be a very good game for all ages. For now, I will just have to go back to the Toon Town in Disneyland to really get that feeling of nostalgia and the sense of what it is like to really be a toon.