At GDC this week, Thatgamecompany CEO Jenova Chen explained some of the design thinking behind Sky: Children of the Light, a game built around community and cooperation.
Sky, a made-for-mobile social MMO, has 260m downloads and counting, says Chen. Over 70% of Sky’s active players are women, and 80% of Sky’s players are between 13-24. The game is most popular in China, Japan, USA, Taiwan and Malaysia, he said.
But as Chen noted during the talk, online games are often full of toxic behaviour, partly because of their design. So how has his studio created a digital space (mostly) free of teabagging and other abuse?
It started with a change in platform. Thatgamecompany’s signature hit made it big on PlayStation, but when mobile arrived, Chen wanted to release his studio’s games there, to the widest possible audience.
The rise of mobile meant that “10 times more people started playing games” – and those players have “no idea what’s happening on PlayStation”, said Chen.
Thatgamecompany wanted to make a ‘four quadrant’ game, as they say in Hollywood – something that can appeal to every kind of player. Making another PlayStation game meant developing for “a majority male platform”, said Chen. “We realised if we stay on PlayStation and on console, at maximum we only hit that little slice of the pie.”
Thatgamecompany decided to shift from making console games to a mobile-first MMO, and from “from hardcore to everyone”, said Chen. But the studio did have some experience with online play through Journey. “When we made Journey, there was no chat…it’s pretty safe, there’s no harassment…there’s no teabagging in Journey either.”
But with Sky, Chen’s team wanted to create “a big social chat room” where players can also hold hands, hug, high five, dance and play music together. This presented many more problems to solve in order to stop players indulging in toxic behaviour.
Chen said players behave the way they do in online games not because they are “born toxic”, but instead because players always seek “maximum feedback”.
Like newborn babies, players in digital spaces seek out feedback and sometimes that feedback is misinterpreted, he said. After speaking to a child psychologist about this phenomenon, Chen was advised that the best approach is to make sure there’s positive reinforcement for positive behaviour, but no feedback for behaviour you don’t want to see.
This idea is threaded through Sky’s social and rewards systems, Chen said, and it pushed the team to make players earn their social power by deliberately creating high barriers to access those features.
Usernames are hidden by default, for example, as Chen said seeing a username like FunkyBottems can take you out of the experience and cause players anxiety. All other Sky players also appear as shadows until you have a proven bond with them, and chat on the game’s ‘talking benches’ is limited to two players who have consented to the interaction.
There are softer social filtering techniques in the game too, like the way a player’s public messages are also visible to their ‘best friend’ in the game – generally, players want to prove to their friends that they are good people, so this discourages most of them from being toxic.
“The higher the entry barriers, the nicer people behave socially – when they finally earn it,” said Chen, who described in-game chat moderation as a last resort, or “the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff”.
“Players should be motivated to spend time with one another because it feels good, not because they have to, or they have something to unlock,” said Chen, who explained that gifting other players items makes them cheaper, one of Sky’s many socially-minded design quirks.
40% of the game’s season passes and 22% of event sales are gifted to players, Chen said.
He added that if a game always makes players feel powerful, the fearlessness that comes with that leads to bad behaviour. But if the player feels vulnerable, they take more care around other players and are nudged toward working together to solve problems.
He concluded with examples of the results of all this work, including when Sky’s players created an impromptu light show at an in-game concert, and how some players reacted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“During the Ukraine and Russia war we were really concerned because we have players from both nations. When they run into each other in the game, instead of having a fight they actually really supported each other,” he added.
“I just never thought a gaming community could be so amazing.”
