Forging Socio-Emotional Connections in Games

In this article, game designer Sande Chen relates important lessons learned from the design of that game company's games, Journey and Sky.

I had the opportunity to attend the 2022 GamesBeat Summit virtually in April and attended Jenova Chen's interview and segment, Fostering Positive Human Connections Through Games.  The conversation really tied in with a previous panel topic at CIMFest, Designing Non-Toxic Game Communities.

Journey, created by that game company, has often been cited as a game that can create a powerful social bond among two strangers. Chen relayed an anecdote about a player who had such a profound experience that he continued the play the game repeatedly just so he could give newbies the same kind of experience he had experienced when he first started playing Journey.  Sky: Children of the Light was Chen's opportunity to expand upon the design of creating emotional bonds between players by thinking about what was needed for this to occur in a multiplayer setting.

According to Chen, designing an environment conducive to positive connections is of utmost importance to creating a congenial community. Very often, toxic communities arise from competitive games that are about one-upping and overpowering other players. In Journey, players were made to feel small by making the environment majestic. They had a feeling of awe. 

In Sky, Chen wanted to simulate social consequences. Too often, players do not have social consequences in a virtual world. If they act badly, they can hide behind a handle or make a new account. In Sky, players are known by what others know about them, which means players needs to consider how they treat others. In addition, players cannot disguise themselves. Anything a player writes in the Sky community is visible to the player's closest friends. 

Players in Sky need to "level up" a relationship, just like people in real life slowly get to know other people and "level up" into friendships. Through "leveling up" a relationship and creating trust, players earn the ability to converse to those players. 

Chen says that toxicity is avoidable and that "game designers are totally capable of changing how people interact in their virtual realms" and can create a positive environment without much change to the system. Once the social consequences are in place, people will behave more like they do in real life. 

Sande Chen is a writer and game designer with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Her writing credits include Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild Award in Videogame Writing. She is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform, a founding member of the IGDA Game Design SIG, and an expert in the field of educational game design.