The Alphaville Herald

The Day the Toons Escaped the Grid

by Alphaville Herald on 13/03/05 at 4:13 pm

By Sheriff Oswald Picklebrains and Pearl Fuzzyswirl

Toontown, the MMO by Disney Corporation, seems transgressive on the surface. Players create avatars that have the basic form of 1930’s animated animals and attack evil corporate “cogs” with gag weapons like cream pies, seltzer bottles, and falling pianos. The cogs – bossbots, lawbots, sellbots, and cashbots – can’t take a joke and explode into a shower of bolts and springs when sufficiently pied or squirted with seltzer. Toon Headquarters sends you to conquer various species of these cogs, ranging from Ambulance Chaser Law Bots, to Bean Counter Cash Bots, to Corporate Downsizer Bossbots. On the surface it is all very anti-establishment, but this *is* Michael Eisner’s Disney behind the curtain, and in point of fact the game is the most regimented and controlled MMO in the history of MMOs. Or it was until the day the Toons escaped the grid.

Some background: Toontown is divided into several districts, each boasting successively more powerful cog infestations. Newbies enter Toontown Central, where a Mickey Mouse NPC annoyingly patrols and spouts saccharine greetings. From there you graduate to Donald’s Dock (yes, *that* Donald), Daisy Gardens (yes, *that* Daisy), Minnie’s Melody Land (yes, Mickey’s squeeze), then The Burgh (where Pluto reigns), and finally Donald’s Dreamland (where Donald sleepwalks 24/7). Donald’s Dreamland is where the baddest cogs dwell and where the l337 700nZ hang. In addition, the advanced players tend to gravitate to one of the dozen or so servers (called Districts) – the chosen District can vary from day to day.

The game itself is highly constrained. Not only are avatars constructed from a menu of fixed options (much like TSO) but avatar names are constructed by concatenating approved name “morphemes” from pull-down menus as well. Other names are possible, but must be approved by Disney Corp. Likewise chat is entirely restricted to canned pull-down expressions, some of which are available when you join, others of which you must purchase with jelly beans (the game currency). More robust P2P communication is only possible if “parental passwords” are first exchanged in real life.

The philosopher Paul Grice once made a distinction between what is literally said and what the person means or intends to communicate by an utterance. His famous example was the teacher who writes a letter of recommendation that say only “Smith is very punctual and has excellent handwriting” – a devastating letter or non-recommendation if there ever was one. Toontown players probably haven’t read Grice, but they certainly understand the practice, and a kind of gaming of the vocab has taken root.

“Are you new here?” tends to mean “you are an idiot”
“have a nice day!” tends to mean, “go away idiot”
“you are a genius” tends to mean “good choice”, but can mean “you are an idiot”

Our final bit of background has to do with “friends” and navigation. One makes friends by clicking on them and selecting a make-friend button. If the target accepts, you are “friends”, but it is an odd sort of friendship given that all communication must take place through a list of some 50 pull down sentences offered by Disney. However, some Toons do manage it, in effect by gaming the vocab as per above.

If someone is on your friends list you are able to teleport to them. You might do this because you want to see them and exchange canned phrases, or you might just want to get to the district where they are, or perhaps the location they are if they are under cog attack. Which leads, finally, to our story.

It all happened on March 12. We were in Donald’s Dreamland in the Loopyville District stocking up on gags at Goofy’s Gag Shop when Pearl noticed a group of toons up in the sky. “How did they get up there?” Oswald was skeptical: “They aren’t really up there, it just *looks* like they are because of a bug.” Pearl had an idea; she mouse-clicked one of them, selected “go to” and teleported to them. She was up in the sky above Donald’s Dreamland! Oswald followed. Other Toons were climbing higher and higher into the sky, and Pearl and Oswald followed higher and higher, running about above Donald’s Dreamland, and at times running off the grid entirely – into what Pearl calls “Gray Space.”

Sheriff Oswald Picklebrains waves to the camera.

For once there was a sense of excitement in the game that is for the most part drudge work. For you see, although Toons are graphically quite colorful, their tasks are so robotic and repetitive that the Toons may as well be as gray as the Cogs. But here was something new! Something fun! A peek – just a small one – behind the curtain. We didn’t see Michael Eisner, but we got behind the façade, and for one day that was enough.

More and more Toons teleported up into the sky, they chased around, they used whatever canned expressions they had that seemed appropriate: “Toontastic!”, “Toons of the World unite!”, and “You are a genius!” Some Toons inexplicably fell to the ground and then teleported back up. Some Toons managed to climb higher and higher, and we followed them until we were all up in the clouds, with Donald’s Dreamland a postage stamp beneath us.

And then, after an hour or so, we all gradually returned to the ground. We had left the grid, we had seen behind the curtain, and we had run in the clouds, but you can only do that so much. So we returned to virtual terra ferma, stocked up on gags, and went back to work. Killing cogs with cream pies.

But wait! What’s the moral? Or is there more than one moral? If there must be morals perhaps these will suffice: First, escaping the grid can be more fun than playing the canned amusements offered us by the gods of the grid. Second, while we may return to the grid, our return doesn’t mean we are happy with the grid. Having found one seam in the grid perhaps we can find others; this becomes our new meta-game. We will also want to return to show others the way to see behind the curtain – we will want to share our discovery with those who haven’t yet escaped the grid.

Finally, seen from above the the grid, the alleged anti-corporate message of Toontown never looked more superficial. If a corporate behemoth invites us to throw pies at corporate America what they are really trying to say is “see, we’re cool, we can take a joke at our expense!” But from above we somehow see that this is as much an illusion as the building facades of Donald’s Dreamland. We may level our Toons and conquer the VP Sellbot and the CFO Cashbot in turn, but what our real game should be is to pull aside more and more curtains, exposing more and more Gray Space, until the day that we open a curtain and find the wizard himself. And then throw a nice fat cream pie in his face. Or better yet, drop a piano on him.

The Toons, gone to a better place.