How Journey eliminated online toxicity with a simple ping

If you've played Journey, the mesmerizing, minimalist adventure from Thatgamecompany, you might recall that despite it being a multiplayer affair, the only way of communicating with other players was to signal using a variety of high-pitched, sonar-like pings. 

It was an interesting mechanic that allowed for nuanced enough interactions, while also leaving a certain sense of ambiguity -- did that series of rapid, sharp beeps mean your companion is scared, angry, or maybe excited? 

It's a unique concept, but how did the idea emerge? In a recent interview with Eurogamer, studio co-founder Jenova Chen explained the team simply wanted players to be able to communicate without allowing for any of the negativity and toxicity often associated with online interactions. 

"Instead of [that conventional multiplayer stuff, like voice chat], we just turned communication into a ping," explained Chen. "When you ping very quickly, you come across as quite urgent. When you ping large, it seems like you are calling. In prototyping and playtesting we found that was kind of ambiguous. People might know you are mad, but they don't hear you cursing at them."

In practice, it worked like a charm, giving players a means of working together and interacting, while allowing them to fill in the language gaps with their own personal narrative. 

"Immediately after the very first playtest, [one of our testers] was saying to other players, 'Were you the blue player? Because you seemed this way,'" added the game's producer, Robin Hunicke. "Like she had opinions of how people had been playing just from watching them move around and call to each other. So we knew that, okay, this happens if you remove all the communication and it's just a kind of puppeteering experience."

If you fancy another peek behind the development curtain, be sure to check out the full interview over at Eurogamer.