Disney's Toon Town
For this week, I decided to pay Disney's Toon Town a visit. Before this, I had heard once that Disney had planned on making a MMORPG type of world. The only thing I knew before signing up was that it'd likely avoid pie throwing. Turns out this was, indeed, the case.
To begin with, I decided to sign up for their 3-day no credit card needed free trial. This entitles me to create one character. The avatar creation process in Toon Town is fairely simple. Micky or Minne, depend on which gender you decide on, guides you pick your character's face, body type, and outfit. All of the avatars that you can chose from are in the same Disney cartoon style.
For me, I decided to make a female dog by the name of Good ol' Clover Trickyfuddy. From what I've gathered from the game, it follows many of the typical RPG patterns. Upon entering, you're placed into a small tutorial where you learn the basic mechanics of the game. You're told the basic plot of the story. In this case, a group of business-like robots have come to Toon Town and are taking over. They happen to dislike good jokes and fun times.
In short, its up to you (the adventurer) to stop them, using your toon's arsenal of gags. This involves pie throwing or squirting flowers. From what I've gathered, all character's start out the same way, with no differences as far as game play are concerned.
Upon completing the turial, you are allowed to go exploring. I ended up liking the world more than I thought I would. It was very colorful and bright, not unlike what I would expect from Disney. There also seemed a number of thing that were possible to do alone. However, I'm guessing as well that teamwork would have a high priority in the game developers minds.
As far as player types or player styles, during my time, however, I was unable to do much looking into the player types or personalities. I didn't see anyone on during my entire visit. So, due to this, I was unable to meet any new people or talk about the game to them (ie. see what they enjoyed doing). From what I can probably gather though, is that the game likely has its number of achievers and probably a high number of socializers. I doubt the number of killers is high, as this is a Disney game and to the best of my knowledge, there is no PVP (player-vs-player) involved.
Long story short, though, it is a kid's game directed at kids. Likely their play types would not fall into the typical categories as one might expect from some of the older players.
I don't know exactly what the creators intended with the game, but it does seem to be a good shell of a game and it does appear to have potential for expanding. For Toon Town in particular, I did not find the two articles "International Bodies" and "Guilded Cage" to be particularly useful in understanding or analyzing Toon Town. The article "Guilded Cage" talked of buying and selling of merchandise for real-life money. I just cannot image a parent allowing their child buy Jelly Beans off of E-bay.