The History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (2007) | Hacker News Reader

The History of Toontown’s SpeedChat (2007)

habitatchronicles.com

102 pointsthunderbong33 comments

This was so fun to read, and reminded me of Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK), Disney’s other popular mmo at the time which was basically a Disney-fied Habbo Hotel [1].

It ran for about 3 years, but what I found interesting is the chat took the initial approach that the creators here dismissed: a whitelisted vocab list of safe words that you could type, and anything not on it would preclude the message from being sent.

There were definitely ways around it, but I also presume active monitoring of the slang, because eventually words like “dam” or phrases “what the shell” were banned too. Another thing that I recall is that case-sensitive spelling mattered, and there was no word bank, so in a way it enforced better spelling.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Magic_Kingdom

As a theme park fan, VMK had a HUGE influence on me (as well as Club Penguin, which I started playing pre-Disney acquisition) -- I run an online community now (in the form of a Minecraft server) and we still take gameplay inspiration from the virtual worlds we grew up playing.

...that being said, I just blacklist words and don't do any smart detection at all, lest I succumb to the Scunthorpe problem. I back that up with a pretty sizable dedicated chat moderation team, of course. But since we max out at ~100 concurrent players, it isn't as huge of a deal for it to scale (miscreants find their way into Discord DM's, unfortunately).

Scale is really where things start. Small communities can be taken care of, and frankly they tend to be more fun. Big ones go off the rails quick as more things have to be automated and delegated.

100% agreed on small communities being more fun. One of the worst times to moderate the server was when a YouTuber known for troll-y content made a video with his friends. The video was really funny, but his fans kept logging on for MONTHS bringing a similar borderline-trolling energy. It was rough.

Our community EXPLODED after some viral TikToks in March 2020, and for the first time in almost a decade we had to start implementing new guards against bad behavior at scale (automatically muting new accounts that join with VPN's, for example). Luckily that's mostly died down, and only the good-faith folks have stuck around!

I remember playing that game once. The vast majority of the chat messages were some variant of, "I need a boy" or "I need a girl", meaning they were looking for dates. I guess boyfriend and girlfriend were banned, but boy and girl weren't. It was hilariously bad.

Reminds me of the Lego Universe anecdotes from a decade ago https://www.managingcommunities.com/2015/06/04/lego-universe...

Wow that's crazy. I always wondered why Lego never made a true building game, especially since they've been putting out good quality software since at least 20 years ago.

Anyone else used Lego Digital Designer or played their old Flash games?

The engine [0] that was used for Toontown is still around and is open source. Uses both C++ and Python.

[0] https://www.panda3d.org/

The game itself is also still around!

Two major flavours:

- Toontown Rewritten, quite close to the original game with QoL features

- Toontown: Corporate Clash (I volunteer there) has brand new mechanics and various QoL to bring it more to a modern MMO's standards

The article mentions "alone together?", but the link is dead; it's been indexed by the Internet Archive though, it's a paper that seems to analyze player's behaviour and social behaviours like guild membership based on WoW from whenever this paper was published: https://web.archive.org/web/20080211222154/http://www.parc.c...

> Sure enough, chatters figured out a few simple protocols to pass their secret code

I played this game when I was a kid, and "discovered" one of these protocols myself. The only problem was maybe half of the kids wouldn't understand what you were trying to do. But there was a big joy in unlocking unrestricted chat with one of your close friends, who'd you'd previously only been able to chat with via canned messages.

As someone who spent 2 years working on server emulator for Disney murdered game - ef Disney. I wonder, are there any VR Studio employees reading HN today, or perhaps rdb? If yes, hi!

Not a VR studio employee but I'm the Tech and Community Lead for Toontown: Corporate Clash.

rdb is truly the goat for keeping all of us in the modern age!

https://xkcd.com/2347/

https://archive.md/74wBh

For those who don't want to access an HTTP-only site on their network.

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.

Source: I worked there for several years.

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.

Source: my wife played this for way too long.

That's what the article is about.

Oh shoot I read the comments first

Lmfao at patched immediately.

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.

> Big yikes, patched immediately.

How was this "patched"?

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.

> a perfectly good system for interacting with other players from outside the game

That’s not the point. The point is you can’t do the opposite, you can’t make real friends on Toontown

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.

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.

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".

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.

Nowadays you can just use an LLM for translation and rewriting offensive or harassing messages and removing innuendo

In theory, yes, in practice it sounds like it could be a very expensive content filter. Then again, a simplified and cheap / optimized single purpose model would work. Given how creative people can get and how many different languages etc there are, it'd be interesting to see. But it would need to be a model that not only knows all the bad words and intents, but also learns the workarounds, like how Roblox users have invented creative phrases like "go commit die", "yeetus yeetus commit self deletus", or "go commit cease vital functions necessary for the prolonging of one's physical being".

Try finger,

but hole

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