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\–Chris Kohler

February 16, 2010

Alongside the upcoming Prince Caspian movie tie-in title for the DS, Disney is launching a service called DGamer that adds chat functionality and social networking aspects, as well as Xbox 360-esque Achievement tracking and personalization options.

The service, which will be contained within all future Disney DS game cartridges, seeks to tie gamers' gameplay experiences to the Disney family of websites (Club Penguin, Disney.com, etc) in a persistent world, giving players the same addictive experience that has made the Xbox 360's stat tracking capabilities such a success.

Seemingly taking a page from Sony's oft-delayed Home, the service also gives gamers a chance to customize a 3-D avatar for themselves, which can be decorated using pre-built wardrobe options or unlockable options found in the games themselves.

Of course, Disney isn't giving children free reign to express themselves.

The entire system is moderated by a human moderation team as well as built-in safeguards (whitelist dictionaries for chat, for instance), and Disney is seemingly very committed to protecting the children in their virtual care.

In addition to the moderation system, children need to acquire permission from their guardians to access many of the system's functionality.

My Orwell-sense tingles at the mere mention of any kind of censorship, but without such a rigorous system in place, DGamer would quickly devolve into a morass similar to the GameFAQs message boards.

As far as mulitplayer gaming goes, DGamer introduces a system that could be essentially deemed "Friend Codes Lite."

Amazingly, it completely bypasses Nintendo's own system (Disney, being the DS' second largest third-party publisher, has a lot of sway) and uses its own proprietary code system for hooking gamers together.

It won't be less complex than the Nintendo system, but hopefully the codes will be shorter than the current 16-number iterations.

If all of this sounds like a marketeer's wet dream when it comes to targeting the under-13 set, you're getting the idea.

Disney wouldn't confirm nor deny the possibility for targeted advertisements with the system, or the idea that customization options could be added as microtransactions, but I get the feeling that there are a long line of PR folks at the House of Mouse who are salivating over the possible revenue streams DGamer introduces.

Given Disney's ability to store endless reams of player information on the DGamer servers – which is then streamed and updated via the DS' Wi-Fi – and the cache the company holds with juvenile gamers, barring any huge errors, the system should be a huge success.