Now that I think about it, the prospect of a play space where it is absolutely impossible to connect with other players outside of the game is kind of horrifying. Come spend all your leisure time in corporate-mediated fake socialization. Make no connections that will ever affect your real life.
Toontown had a perfectly good system for interacting with other players from outside the game: you would get a code and exchange it via some other established channel with someone you already knew (over the phone, AOL instant messenger, etc). Once you had that you could chat normally, without needing SpeedChat. For a minute there was a workaround someone figured out for sharing text in the game (as discussed in the article) that would've potentially let people share codes and start chatting outside SpeedChat. Big yikes, patched immediately.
Disney cared about children's online safety obsessively, and would have preferred to close down the whole virtual world and lay off the team rather than put a single child at risk.
I met a lot of folks playing TT and the method that I used most was to jump for numbers and the first letter of speed chat was the letter. Adults and older teens picked up on it and kids did not so it worked out well.
I played some TT rewritten a couple of years back and everyone can just chat away. My opinion is that restricted chat was better.
Not obsessively enough to employ some actual moderators though.
I find it interesting that the only understanding of "safety" was to put the players into a sort of digital straitjacket which made the social aspect of the game effectively unusable (and if used as intended would have made it impossible to get to know new people inside the game) - but at the same time, when people figured out how to break the straitjacket, apparently no one cared.
Did the company ever check if the players inventing that "furniture protocol" or sharing codes on message boards were just inventive kids or exactly the kind of harrassers or groomers that the system was supposed to prevent?
Yes. Systems like this always feel trying to make a kindergarten with no teachers there to notice when the kids are being jerks to each other and make it stop. There's just a robot who enforces a very limited code of speech.
That was 1000% a feature and not a bug. It's naive to think that a concentration of children on the internet is safe from creeps without some safety measures.
I, too, wish there weren't bad people in the world and we could just trust everyone around our kids.
My wife played Toon Town as a kid and in-game code sharing was by far her favorite part of the entire game. It also really doesn't sound like it was patched "immediately".
This happened before I started there, but from my understanding it was patched as soon as it was discovered. It was a tricky thing to catch since it's not something that readily shows up unless you're spying on every one of the tens of thousands of client sessions, and this was before YouTube when someone would've posted a video about it for clout.
They also had a way to share friend codes in game. I don’t remember exactly what it was but there was a mechanism that had letters on a wall and combined with a few other things you could make out someone’s code.
I wouldn't call it horrifying because here in this context it's to protect kids (and Disney's brand of course) but I think this is similar to the situation of mobile games like Call of Duty mobile, where probably more than half of ranked games are played with you alone in a lobby full of bots with real-looking usernames (no other human playing) and because it's played mostly on smartphones, barely anyone uses text chat, so not many realize they are playing with bots until they get to high ranks where it becomes obvious that some games you get crushed by everyone, and some games you get 30 kills without dying and you get a tactical nuke, when you're supposed to be in the top 5% ranked.
Dead internet, everywhere. I'm not even sure why there are bots in ranked, since so many people play this game, I don't think this was made because you get longer wait times to find opponents in higher ranks. Maybe to make you feel better about your skill level.
They even lied about it in community updates:
Since release we have seen many different inquiries of all types about Bots in Multiplayer and Battle Royale. We know you all have a great many questions about this, so let’s talk about Bots. We added bots into Call of Duty: Mobile to provide a way for new players to grow, learn, and thrive without the constant threat of a full team of higher level & more experienced players continually dominating them.
They still provide a challenge while allowing you to learn the ins & outs of levels, test out new builds or weapons, and gradually increase your skill. Bots are not present in Ranked matches and in other modes as you grow in skill, you’ll see fewer and fewer bots present. We appreciate all of feedback surrounding this and we will be looking to improve those systems throughout the lifespan of the game.
Some games with limited chat definitely feel that way too, I usually don't play them much unless they have a decent singleplayer experience.
Played a bit of Toontown when it was released just to see what other games were doing and thought the chat was pretty restrictive for communicating even in game tasks but appropriate for the intended audience of small kids, only wishing there was a larger "vocabulary".
