Disney Stakes New Online Territory

Craig Dalrymple knows the Internet can be ugly. As a devout player of online fantasy games, Dalrymple himself has meted out some of that ugliness.

For his 5-year-old son, though, the Chicago father of three wanted a more orderly, tidy and safe virtual world -- someplace more like Disneyland than Middle Earth.

“I know what’s out there, and it’s not stuff I want my kids to see,” said Dalrymple, 31, who instead lets son Adan play “Toontown Online,” an attempt by Walt Disney Co. to create an online version of its theme parks.

Made to accommodate thousands of players at once, Disney’s “Toontown” borrows from such popular online games as “EverQuest” and “Asheron’s Call.” But unlike those rowdy and often bawdy games, squeaky-clean “Toontown” is the first multiplayer Internet game aimed squarely at children.

The game represents a multimillion-dollar effort by Disney to extend its dominance in family entertainment to the Internet, a realm traditionally hostile to kid-friendly ventures. Pedophiles, online bullies and strict children’s privacy laws have driven many children’s Web sites out of business -- and earned the Internet a reputation as a dicey place for minors.

“There used to be all kinds of exciting sites online for kids,” said Amy Bruckman, assistant professor of computer science at Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing in Atlanta. “The majority of them have either gone away or reduced interactivity to a minimum. They’re afraid to let kids talk because of the safety and liability issues. That’s a shame because the promise of the Internet is its ability to connect people.”

Armed with experience in building tightly controlled theme parks, Disney executives believe they have carved out in “Toontown” a virtual haven that lets kids interact with other players. By limiting what kids can say and rewarding only good behavior, “Toontown” tries to end-run the bad manners and predatory tactics rampant in the games that inspired it.

“Toontown,” launched in October with next to no marketing, is being watched closely by children’s advocates and online games groups anxious to see whether it’s possible to create a kids’ site that is not only safe, but also fun and profitable. Disney charges a monthly fee to play the game -- $9.95 for the first month and $5.95 for every month thereafter -- but has not released subscription figures.

For years, a small but growing number of adults has connected online through multiplayer games that let people wander through fantasy worlds, battling dragons and building social networks. In the 1980s, these worlds were little more than text-based chat rooms. But as personal computers became increasingly powerful, the games took on more realistic graphics. Today’s games have miles of virtual terrain and three-dimensional environments.

But what keeps these games alive -- some for more than a decade -- are their social aspects. Players build human ties that are as intense as if forged in real life.

Repercussions

As a result, online games mirror life, with good and bad behavior. Because of the Internet’s ability to cloak identities, some people cut loose online, saying and doing things they wouldn’t normally because they feel that their online actions have little real-world consequence.

But for kids especially, there can be repercussions.

“The environment is virtual, but the feelings are real,” said Gordon Walton, who headed online services for a game called “Ultima Online” and now is executive producer at Electronic Arts Inc. for an upcoming game called “The Sims Online.”

The premise of “Toontown” is classic Disney. Toontown is overrun with “cogs” -- cranky robots that try to transform the town into a stuffy, gray place. To save Toontown, players must defeat the cog army by playing practical jokes on them.

Since “Toontown’s” launch, executives say, nothing untoward has occurred in the game.

They credit the game’s design. From the beginning, “Toontown” creators tried to weed out bad behavior by studying other games.

“Early on, we played all the other online games to get a sense of what they were like,” said Mike Gosselin, director of the Disney studio that created “Toontown.” “These were games that were made for adults.

“We had a different mission,” Gosselin added. “Coming from a background of designing theme parks, we have our eyes on the mass market. We realized pretty quickly by playing them with kids in mind what the problems were. We made a list of things we needed to avoid.”

One of them was competition, which tended to draw out the worst in players. So “Toontown” designers created incentives for players to cooperate. Players never fight each other, but take on humorless robot cogs by, say, throwing pies. Players are rewarded for teaming up to take on especially grim cogs.

“We went out of our way to reward working together,” Gosselin said. “The spin isn’t about killing and looting. It’s about defending Toontown.”

In most other online games, players must collect resources that have been artificially limited to create value and demand. In “Toontown,” there’s nothing to hoard. Kids collect pies to throw at cogs, but there’s no limit to the number of pies available.

The game also takes a different tack on death. In most other games, in which conflict and battle are key elements, characters can die. Although they can be reincarnated, players lose points or treasure when their characters pass away.

In “Toontown,” however, the Toons can’t die. Instead, they simply lose “laff” points and must return to the playground to get happy.

“To a 20-year-old, the concept of death is OK,” said Joe Shochet, lead “Toontown” designer. “For a 5-year-old, it can be crushing to watch your character die. So we decided to take the teeth out of dying.”

Online ‘Griefing’

Another unpleasant aspect of online games is harassment by other players. The phenomenon is so prevalent that there’s a term for it: “griefing.” The harassment can take many forms, but the most damaging version is live chat, which griefers use to hurl taunts, insults and epithets.

Chatting also is the way players communicate and develop friendships, so “Toontown” designers were reluctant to abolish the feature. Rather, they developed what they call speed chat, a menu of more than 100 canned phrases that players can choose from to say roughly what they want. Options include “Hooray!” and “Want to be my friend?” to “Hey!” and “Stop that!” The harshest phrase is “You stink.”

Live chat, where players type unrestricted messages to each other, is an option but must be enabled by a parent with special access to the account.

Even then, players can chat only by obtaining a randomly generated secret code in the game and giving that code to a friend. Because no chatting is allowed in the game otherwise, the code must be handed over outside the context of “Toontown.” This, of course, requires that the player knows the friend outside the game. The code lasts 48 hours and allows players to chat freely. No one else in the game can see the chat, rendering it a private conversation.

Although Disney does not have employees monitoring the chats, it does have a program that keeps a log and tries to filter out bad language and any series of digits that look like phone numbers. One of the tenets of Internet child safety is to not permit children to give out personal information -- phone numbers, addresses and school names -- that can let another person locate the child.

Children’s privacy, federally protected by a law passed four years ago, prohibits Web sites from collecting personal information from children younger than 13 without parental consent. This requirement is a key factor in forcing many sites out of business, according to Parry Aftab, an Internet law attorney and executive director of WiredSafety Inc., a nonprofit online safety advocate group.

“Many of the sites were profiling kids and selling the marketing information to other companies and vendors,” Aftab said. “That was deemed illegal in 1998, and many of those sites went out of business. It’s become very challenging since then to find a business model for building profitable children’s sites that has high quality, rich content, which can be very costly.”

Disney got over those twin hurdles of making money and complying with the law by turning to a monthly subscription fee billed to a credit card. Under the 1998 law, receiving credit card information is equivalent to securing parental consent because the law assumes that only adults can obtain credit card accounts.

Revenue Models

For Disney, the subscription is one of three revenue models helping to stabilize its Internet venture. In the late 1990s, Disney chased the Internet boom, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop Go.com as a competitor to other Web portals such as Yahoo Inc. The effort led to massive losses. In 2001, Disney took a $790-million charge against its earnings to write down the value of its flagging Internet assets.

“Toontown” is considered a marquee effort in Disney’s new Internet strategy. Although financially risky, fee-based games can be among the most profitable Internet ventures. “Toontown” plays on Disney’s expertise in building entertainment venues for families. And it leans on well-known Disney characters to draw in parents and their young children.

For the Dalrymples, the formula has worked.

“The familiar environment was a great draw” for Adan, Dalrymple said. “He recognized Mickey Mouse right away.”