'Nobody is born toxic' says Journey's creative director while preparing to launch the kindest MMO on PC

After the critical success of its emotional, musical adventure Journey in 2012, Thatgamecompany's creative director Jenova Chen had aspirations to reach a much broader audience of players. Journey was popular on console, with an audience that Chen jokingly described as men in their 30s who were conveniently journalists and awards judges, but «teenagers hated Journey,» he said. I must have been an outlier. 

So Thatgamecompany decided to make an MMO, a genre that's definitely popular with teens, but rarely synonymous with the wholesome, friendly experiences with strangers that Journey was known for. During an interview at GDC earlier this month, Chen told me all about the challenges of designing a non-toxic social space in Sky: Children of the Light, just ahead of its PC launch.

«There are so many things currently wrong with how the internet was designed,» Chen told me. «As a designer, I'm just really pissed that people are so careless when it comes to maintaining the culture of a space.» He said that too many online spaces, from YouTube comments sections to online games, are geared so that people are constantly encouraged to seek out the biggest reactions—by being shocking, trolling, or downright offensive. When given so much power to affect those around us, it's as if we revert to some primal baby state, seeking constant social feedback for good or ill.

Chen had been thinking about this problem back during Journey's development too. During his GDC talk this year, «Designing to Reduce Toxicity in Online Games,» Chen described the many iterations of Journey's core systems that it took to ensure that players would see each other as friendly collaborators instead of competition for resources. In the end, Thatgamecompany nailed it—all my memories of Journey are those magical moments with an unknown other player patiently guiding me through a tough area or walking into the light together at the game's end.

«When we made Journey, that very person who was teabagging another