Victoria Tran has a game-changing idea for changing video games

digitaltrends.com:

In October 2020, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) slipped into the engine room of a spaceship and said, “I can’t kill Poki, she’s so nice.”

Seconds later, she killed Poki.

The gameplay murder was part of a Twitch stream of Among Us, a massively popular social deduction game created by the indie studio Innersloth. While it premiered two years earlier, Among Us fandom boomed in 2020, fueled by pandemic boredom and internet celebrity interest. The point of the game is to work with “crewmates” to complete a series of tasks before “imposters” onboard kill everyone. But despite being a game rooted in quiet stabbing, its community guidelines emphasize a contradictory quality: Kindness.

This has much to do with Victoria Tran, the 27-year-old community director at Innersloth.

“I don’t know if you know this, but the internet doesn’t have a great reputation for being kind and nice,” Tran tells Digital Trends while on a call from her home in British Columbia, Canada.

There are trolls on every platform, and gamers have a particular reputation — earned or not. But Tran has seen the good of the internet. She experienced it while growing up on massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), like Habbo Hotel and Tibia. She’s made genuine connections online that mean a lot to her. So Tran’s thinking is: How can we make online communities better?

“A lot of my work is based on the fact that while I have the energy, and while I have this curiosity, I want to explore the ways that we can make the internet better and not be satisfied with stereotypes,” Tran says.

“In some ways, I’ve kind of trained my entire life for this.”

Tran is known in the gaming industry for incorporating kindness into community design. This means designing spaces inside