My 7 year old son and 40 year old self are addicted to it, too. It's completely safe in that you can't chat with others. You can only communicate through a series of pull-down menus that have pre-set words and short phrases. There's really no way to communicate anything beyond what they have set up, and it's all game related.
In the game, Toontown is a wonderful collection of neighborhoods in which toons live and play. The only problem is, there are cogs (robot-like machines) that want to take over the buildings in Toontown. The game has a wonderful sense of humor that is lost on the kids. The cogs are all boring grown-up-type robots. There are lawbots, sellbots, cashbots and bossbots. They have classifications and funny names (some sellbots are Cold Callers and Name Droppers, some cashbots are Bean Counters and Loan Sharks [which look like a shark head coming out of a business suit], some bossbots are Yes Men and Flunkies, and some lawbots are Ambulance Chasers and Spin Doctors).
Toons are guided to complete a series of toontasks to defeat the cogs and keep Toontown a happy place for toons. When you try to defeat cogs, you "fight" them with gags. Gags get stronger as you get deeper in the game, but they start out with throwing a pie at the cogs or splashing the cogs with seltzer. When you have done it enough times to defeat a cog, the cog starts whirring around and then flies apart into a mess of nuts and bolts. It's pretty comical. And when the cogs "fight" the toons, the toons don't get injured but rather lose laugh points. If you lose all your laugh points, you don't "die," but you do get sad. You are automatically transported to the nearest playground, where you must walk around for a while in order to get happy again.
There are several playgrounds, each with its own theme. There's Mickey's Toontown Central (with a friendly Mickey as host), Donald's Dock (Donald drives a boat in the central lake), Minnie's Melodyland (musically-oriented), Donald's Dreamland (Donald sleepwalks in a nightshirt and nightcap) and a place called The Brrrgh, a winter-themed playground.
Each playground has a place to go to play pretty fun games. The better your performance in the games, the more jellybeans you earn. Each playground also has a fishing pond, where you use jellybeans as bait but then catch fish worth even more jellybeans. You collect jellybeans to spend on more gags to "fight" the cogs, plus on things like decorations and furniture for your toon's house, and even to buy a pet. A toon's pet is called a doodle. i LOVE the sense of humor of this site.
The graphics are pretty darn-near 3-D and are very impressive. It teaches strategy -- there are many details about what gags work best against which type of cogs in certain situations, plus you must also balance out fighting cogs with playing games to earn jellybeans, and the games all promote various skills. The game also promotes teamwork. As your toon gains more experience and completes more toontasks and accumulates more laugh points, the toon tasks become so difficult that you can't complete them alone and you MUST cooperate with other toons in order to complete the tasks.
Good CLEAN fun, all in all. I think they offer a very brief free trial -- check it out for yourself. But I warn you now, it's VERY addicitive.
Watch for Baron von Zippenflinger and The Chosen One. But the security is so tightly built-in to this game that even if you read this and then see my toon in the game, there's no way you're going to be able to communicate to me that you saw my post on the DISboards. No way. You'll just be able to choose from a menu and say things like, "I like your name" or "let's go fight the cogs" or "I have to go."
I have to go.