To a casual observer, Disney's Toontown online may seem like a child's game with it's cartoon characters and animations. But a deeper look reveals not only technical sophistication, but also addicting game play that rewards advanced strategies and on-the-fly calculations of probabilities and risk. In fact, strategy can change quickly depending on a number of factors for the same challenge or task. Layer upon this is the team play required for more advanced tasks - ranging from two players to eight. Then there's the social aspect of general cooperation and making "friends" interwoven into the game play which can range from one-time encounters to long-term relationships. Altogether, the Toontown universe and community makes for some very interesting reflections of real-world behavior that begs examination.
Though there are many similar aspects between Toontown and other online community-supporting games like Club Penguin, World of Warcraft, Second Life and even console-based games like Halo, Tooniversity is going to focus on Toontown (TT) because of it's broad appeal to players of a very wide age range - pre-school to adults - and it's G-rated nature, and make occasional references to other massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG or "morps").
(Interestingly, the major unofficial TT-based community sites maintain similar G-rated content restrictions and privacy guidelines - more on this later.)
Tooniversity will present advanced strategies for game play on Toontown, as well as commentary on various aspects of TT - primarily TT's reflections of real-world social and "economic" issues.
