The previous reputation of "Journey's" multiplayer system is that of anonymous kindness and emotional connection, the exact opposite of the multiplayer experience of the "Dark Souls" games (unless you've been visited by the fashion police or "Let Me Solo Her"). You wouldn't expect Thatgamecompany's very friendly MMO "Sky" to have anything to draw inspiration from the "Souls" games: but its message system is based on exactly that.

This was part of a talk that Creative Director Genova Chen gave at this year's Game Developers Conference: "Designing for Less Toxicity in Online Games," and prior to that, he gave us plenty of details on designing a non-toxic MMO. Sky has been developing free-to-play MMOs on other platforms for nearly five years and was heavily influenced by the flight and co-exploration of the studio's hit Journey.

"With each game we create, our view is very black and white, as we don't understand the nuances at first; in Journey, there is no text communication at all, and players communicate only through melodic chirping!" The player is not expected to communicate through text, but only through melodic chirps. However, players kept telling TGC that they wanted a way to communicate via text, and when we moved from "Journey" to "Sky," we thought, "Let's see if we can make this work. Let's see if we can make texting work."

Sky allowed direct chat between friends, but another system that TGC adopted was a small origami message boat that Sky players could place in the world for others to find and read, which was definitely the ground for Dark Souls' Chen admits that the system was inspired by the system of placing soapstone messages on the In Dark Souls, however, players are limited to a bank of words to compose their messages, and this is where common gags like "awesome treasure chest ahead" written near a statue instead of a treasure chest come from. in Sky, players are actually free to type in their own messages.

That complete freedom became another challenge in Chen's quest to foster a multiplayer space that encourages good behavior. As he puts it, "Right after you allow people to leave messages in the world, they become Internet memes." While that is not inherently negative, we have all seen how doing it for the sake of memes can devolve into internet trolling and bullying. To keep the messaging system on a positive track, Cheng says the studio has announced that it will begin showing friends which messages were written by you.

"As soon as we announced that, I saw the community get excited and quickly delete the embarrassing messages they had written," Chen says. 'They were actively deleting messages. I was really, really pleased to see that. I didn't realize how effective it was. They really cared what their friends thought of them."

Thatgamecompany extended the sense of positive social pressure by changing the visibility of messages based on whether friends in the game thought they were good or bad. If some of the friends thought the message was great, it would be safe to share it with others, but if some thought it was bad, it might be hidden.

So what are Sky players writing about these days? And then there are the philosophical anecdotes. It's sort of like 'Chicken Soup for the Soul.' People seem to really like it. They can't say it directly, so they leave confessions."

If not the euphemism-laden Mad Libbing of Souls game messages, Sky players undoubtedly have their own popular jokes about the game. Messages range from the serious to the silly, be they proverbs or simply a "like!" or simply asking for a "like. Given how much time Chen has spent thinking about Sky's community and culture, it will be interesting to see how it holds up before the PC version launches on April 10.