Sky: Children of the Light, theJourneydeveloper Thatgamecompany’s take on an online live-service game, turns five years old this week. Beyond its beautiful environments and emotional narrative, the game has become known for its helpful and wholesome community–but building this community hasn’t happened without hard work and clever design.
Speaking to me at SkyFest, a celebration of the game’s fifth anniversary in Tokyo, Japan, Thatgamecompany CEO and creative director Jenova Chen tells me online gaming is like giving a baby a gun. “What is a social shotgun in an online virtual space? Someone who can say the most nasty things and get away without any consequence, right?” Jenova explains. So how do you create an online social space without giving shotguns to babies?
“We created this idea of dual consent. So before any content is pushed to you, you are asked ‘do you want to accept?’” Jenova explains. “Everybody’s appearance could be offensive, so before you even see them, they are a shadow. You have the choice to decide if you want to see this person or not, by touching the candle with them. Even if their appearance looks normal, their name might be offensive. So before you see their name, you are asked to name them.
It’s a garden we’re protecting - Jenova Chen
“Every single step we are giving control to you, and this creates a barrier. And the higher the social barrier it is, the more they will cherish the relationship. If it took me 30 minutes of play with you to build trust, and you finally allow me to be your friend and start to speak to me, I wouldn’t just say ‘F you’, right?”
Sky: Children Of The Light Is Online Gameplay Built Around Consent
Sky community manager Denise Schlickbernd agrees that consent is the key to a positive experience for players. “It allows players to go at their own pace and set their own boundaries,” she explains. “But also lets them put the brakes on things if they’re not comfortable with what the other person is trying to say or do in the game.” Even once that initial relationship is formed, tension between players is still possible, and even more likely when it comes to challenging or high-stakes play sessions. TGC identified a number of common design choices that caused friction between players, and intentionally designed around them.
“There are mechanics you’re able to accidentally design in a way that, if you have a friend who is not so skillful, it makes things worse for you,” explains design manager Atlas Chen. “In Sky, we’re really trying to make that less possible. For example, the hand holding mechanism: even if you are super new to video games or mobile, you can just hold someone’s hand and they will show you around.”
“There is no weight system where if you hold more people you fly less–you actually get charged [up] by your friends,” Atlas continues. “We see a lot of toxicity coming from this kind of failure to collaborate, where you blame your teammates for dragging the team back, so we try to be cautious about creating that kind of dynamic.”
While much of Sky’s friendly design was built into the game from the start, the live service model necessitates constant upkeep. After its initial release on iPhone in 2019, Sky was subsequently launched on Android, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and most recently PC. As player numbers grew from thousands into the millions, the team was constantly having to modify its approach.
“It’s a garden we’re protecting, but the weeds tend to grow every time the garden shifts,” Jenova explains. “Even using the same system we used to think was great, over time when a tree grows too big, it casts unnecessary shadows.”
Game Design, Not Game Management, Maintains Sky’s Environment
Where many online games respond to negative player behavior by ramping up moderation, or simply removing an abused feature from the game, TGC’s approach is often rooted in the game design itself. Where toxicity can slip past even the strictest word filter, Sky instead influences player behavior in more subtle ways.
“We have this thing where a player can leave a post in the world of Sky, it’s like a geotagged post,” Jenova mentions as one example. “Initially, people really left nasty messages in the front of the road. You cannot escape seeing it. Just like how people are painting graffiti on the street, they just want to get maximum feedback. We changed it, so we made the author visible to their closest friends. So your friend can tell you wrote this, here in the middle of the street, right? And then they learn to remove it because they don’t want their friends to see them saying nasty things.”
“To encourage the friends to say nice things, we added a mechanic where, if you like the post, you can click a heart. And if there’s enough likes, then the post becomes available to the public. So if you walk around in the world of Sky, most of the posts you see are already pre-proofed by real people.”
As a long-time player of Sky, I’m often shocked by how well TGC’s approach to online gaming works in practice. In hundreds of hours of play, I’ve never encountered any griefing, trolling, or harassment–behaviors that are often inescapable in online play.
What Can Other Games Learn From Sky: Children Of The Light?
So is there anything in Sky’s approach that could benefit other online games that struggle with toxic communities? While Sky’s core gameplay style lends itself more to friendly play than most, the TGC developers agree that other studios could still learn something from its success.
“First person shooters might not be about going and holding hands with people, fair,” says Schlickbernd. “But the rules of basic respect and courtesy, setting guidelines for the kind of language that you would want people to speak to each other with–those are rules that anyone can set. Just because the goal of your game is to kill a bunch of bosses or whatever, doesn’t mean that a player should expect to be called names when they go into a community space.”
“I think it’s hard,” Jenova acknowledges off the bat. “We were neighbors toRiot Gamesand I met the founder, and I met their head of player behavior group, who has a PhD in psychology, and we talked about this multiple times. Like, how can we use what we learned here to help them?
“There is a fundamental problem. You cannot be competitive at the same time and be nice. You know, it’s very, very hard.” Jenova says, though that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. He suggests that traditional notions of sportsmanship might be the key. “It’s really about like the fact everybody’s watching, right? You’d better behave nice. However, in online games, usually you don’t have an audience. So I think maybe what they could learn from us is to think about how to build accountability for the players. If the competitive game can build a strong, tight social network–not like Facebook, but connecting them together–then you don’t want to make your friends disappointed.”
Beyond the world of online gaming, Jenova believes that anyone in charge of a social system, whether that’s social media companies or even real-world institutions, has a responsibility to pay attention to the impact it has on its users.
“We are not born evil. But our environment would affect our behavior,” Jenova explains, bringing up the Stanford Prison Experiment as an example. “Designs that give certain people lots of power, where other people have no power but to become submissive, then this environment will get bad.
“It does feel like video games, particularly online video games, are the frontier of policies,” he adds, mentioning how game developers can change something and see its effect on player behavior in real time. “We have good lessons and bad lessons we’ve learned. I just hope that our games can provide a good role model, so people can find inspiration and copy or borrow the good mechanics to apply it to their own real world situations.”
