How Demon's Souls Inspired Journey's Gentle Social Systems
Well before he began working on Journey, Jenova Chen was, in his own words, "a rebel who wanted to make things that nobody else would want to make."
He began pursuing that goal while still a college student with Cloud in 2005, a game about a hospital patient whose imagination takes him into the skies while his body remains in bed. With the formation of Thatgamecompany in 2006, he followed it up with Flow and Flower, similarly wordless, emotional, and "zen" games that received acclaim despite - or perhaps because of - their stark differences from everything else available in the mainstream at the time.
But Journey, which this weekend celebrates its ten-year anniversary, took that a step further. While also an emotional, wordless, and beautiful adventure like its older siblings, Journey embraced a new element that they hadn't: social play.
In Journey, players are automatically paired up with another random player in the same area as they are, and can choose to travel together. Though they can't directly interact, players can use a button input to make a "chime" sound at one another, which players have used to indicate which way to go, what to do, or just to express joy or enthusiasm at obstacles overcome. The system has sparked countless stories of human connection over the years as strangers helped one another. Chen tells me he's heard from players who have played the game tens or even hundreds of times, for the sole altruistic purpose of guiding new players.
Journey's brilliant and at the time completely novel social system was conceived out of Chen's stated spirit of rebellion. In 2009 when Chen began working on Journey, he was simultaneously watching the rise of Zynga as a dominant force in gaming. As he looked at
Read more on ign.com
