Where the hoo-ha did "Toon" come from?

Because nobody has asked within recent memory, and searching "toon" will get me nowhere.

There are alot of things about this game and it's players that drive me loopy. Catgirls, Fire/Kin roflfarmers, "Dark Lord Dark of Darkness" characters on blueside, to name a few. But there is one thing that has been slowly plucking at my nerves non-stop since I started my career of defeating enemies by bludgeoning them with my own health pool: People using the word "Toon". Maybe it's the childish, degrading nature of the term instantly calling to mind Bugs Bunny slapstick*, serving to remind me that I am in fact a 26 year old manchild playing a MMO instead of getting drunk and grunting at football games like a real man.

I really can't explain why I hate the term, but I do know that I have never heard it used in any other game I've ever played. So far as I know, it's exclusive to CoX, which is pretty odd considering how universal MMO lingo usually is. And most of those terms can trace their roots back to either programming lingo or D&D lingo, "Toon" just seems so random and out-of-place to me. Where did it come from?

--EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION--

I know the origin of the word toon. Roger Rabbit sits comfortably in my upper bracket of movie rankings. What I meant, and what people seem to have missed, is how it became a relevant term to this game, or alternatively to whatever other game it may have spawned from, and how it migrated to us. Like I said, you won't find people in may other MMOs using the word toon to describe their characters. And most terms have easy-to follow roots. "Proc" was just short for "procedure", describing a line of code which triggers and executes when certain parameters are met, and that term can easily be traced from WoW to everything else. "XP" is likewise easily traced to D&D, the grandfather of all modern RPGs, shorthand for "Experience". See what I'm getting at? Nowhere in CoX is there a word even similar to "Toon". It's not short for anything. It can't be traced to programming code, it can't be traced to D&D or WoW, it has no connection to anything related to CoX so how did it become so widespread?


*Disclaimer: Bugs Bunny is a total BAMF and I mean no disrespect to the Almighty Rabbit.

hahaha, well, you have to face it, Grimdark was a comics phase...

The term bugs me less here where characters actually might be cartoony, it's more bothersome in other games where your character is nothing like a toon.

Also I think it originates from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Hmm..

iirc "toon" became a nickname for an online game avatar/character/persona/whatever quite a while before CoH was released.

But maybe if there were a Toon Online MMO, using the word "Toon" to refer to your character would be wholly appropriate.

Back when that 3/4 overhead sprite mmo first started I was part of the anti-"Toon" movement and it seemed like most of it was coming from forever crack players though I'm sure you could trace "toon" all the way back to Longitude (13x4)+7 and further back to muds.

The term toon first emerged in late 2001 early 2002 in a game called Everquest. I played Ultima Online from when it first came out (Which was the "first" MMORPG, see the quotations) and that was never used there.

When Everquest came out it emerged as what paved the way for all the other MMORPG's out there. There were several terms flying around at the time:

Character or char to describe your character

Main to describe your primary character

Twink which was your alt character that you decked out with gear

Avatar (Not really used) to describe a character.

The prominent word of choice was character back in the day but somewhere along the way new players to the MMORPG's started using toon which was much shorter.

Ultimately, you can tell how "old school" a MMORPG player is by whether they use character (Like I do) or if they use toon.

I used to get a little miffed when someone referred to my more 'serious' characters as toons, but then I usually realize I'm taking the game too serious. Heck, I refer to 'em as toons myself often enough.

Ultimately, I think "toon" comes from the same places as "ur" and "ppl":

• Laziness ("character" is almost TEN WHOLE LETTERS IN A ROW! Nobody has that kind of time or energy!)
• Semi-literacy (the ch in "character" sounds like a k! And then when that same sound shows up again later in the word, it's spelled different! Who could ever hope to make sense of all that madness?)
• An attitude that "3+3=7" is close enough because "u know wut i mean."

"Toon" is the name of a table-top roleplaying game published by Steve Jackson Games that first came out in 1984 (Roger Rabbit was released in 1988). It's much like the old D&D roleplaying games, except the conceit is your characters are animated cartoon characters.

So the term "toon" applied to characters people play antedates the movie by at least four years.

Every time someone ingame says toon, I take their sentence, replace toon with toontown, then feed it back to them.

Character all the way.

I spend too much time and creativity to call them "toons". I have "characters".

As mentioned, it was being used before this game.

And... anyone who gets so upset about the use of "toon" doesn't have much character!

Toon is easier to type. The End.

It's amazing what gets people all worked up.

Toontown, by the way, was a fantastic rules-light RPG. One session that a friend ran was simply a race, and one of the NPC teams was the grizzly bears from hell -- based on an old Gary Larson cartoon in which two bears are sitting in a beat-up, abandoned wreck of a car, and one says, "Think of it, if we could get this baby fixed up, we could run down mule deer... we'd be the grizzley's from hell!" (paraphrased from memory). Their only goal in the game was to run over everyone else. Made for a hilarious game session. ^_^

I will admit I sometimes use toon because it is easy. I also use alt. Although character seems to make a lot of sense, I don't use it much. Again, admitting that it is probably being lazy. I am an educated person and I don't like the lazy-speak in emails or written communication, but in a game, I am much more likely to go the quick route. (Although I did find myself telling a teammate that we were not "doing very good" on a tf, but that we were doing well...then I shut up because it is a game)

Actually, the novel "Who Censored Roger Rabbit?" was published in 1981. As far as I know, that was the first usage of the word "toon" in print. I don't know whether Steve Jackson had read the novel or just came up with the word independently. (It's a fairly obvious contraction of the word "cartoon", I'd say.)

As applied to video games, I feel pretty safe in crediting the film, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" for the popularization of the word "toon" as applied to video game characters. The reasons why "toon" would never be applied to pen and paper characters ought to be intuitively obvious. A PnP character is in your imagination. A video game character is an animated graphical character. With the rise of computer animation in cartoon production, the association is an obvious one.

"Toon" is a semi-derogatory term, or at least is started out that way. People who used it were typically being facetious or otherwise indicating that they were poking fun at players who felt that PC's were Serious Business. As noted by some, this became prevalent in Everquest where there were many people at the time who took their characters very seriously. Calling your character a "toon" was like saying that you didn't really care about it or that you were otherwise someone who did not eat, sleep and breath EQ.

Like most such terms ("carebear" being an example) there were enough people that "grew up" hearing the terms that they began taking them as acceptable terminology and the derogatory meaning was more or less lost. A young player might refer to a toon off-handedly and then become confused when an older player took offense at the reference.