The Joystiq Show #028 pulls off a coup of an interview of Jenova Chen, who offers some pretty profound thoughts in response to Alexander Sliwinski’s “So what did you learn from creating Journey?” question. The answer, basically, is that he discovered some possible truths about the interrelationship between morality and the systems within which we operate:

So my biggest lesson learned is that human behavior may appear to be a bad moral behavior, but it’s not really their fault; they’re just following their instinct. It is the designer who creates the system who has the responsibility to moderate the right behavior you want. By providing feedback for the things you want to see and by providing zero feedback on the things you don’t want to see, you can actually quite control the moral value in the game…. It’s really the system that’s defining the people’s behavior, rather than that person himself is better or worse.

Full transcript follows…

Starting at 1:18 in the podcast, Chen describes his experience with an early, 4-player prototype of Journey rendered top-down, in Flash:

During that process, I almost lost my faith in humanity… We spent all this time creating these desolate, lonely desert environments, difficult so that people should help each other to get through difficulties. And what happened is, when our designer was saying ‘Hey these mechanics where the two players could help each other to climb over rocks are very cool, but there isn’t really physics between the players so if the players can push against each other, like one player can push the other player up, that would be awesome, right?’ and we say ‘yeah yeah if you had physics the players could push against strong wind, the player behind him could push him, and help each other, that’s awesome.’ So we implemented the physical collision between players, so then they could start pushing each other. And we were very excited to see if our playtesters would play the game helping each other pushing against wind, and pushing each other to climb up to a higher place. Instead of helping each other, what happened is the players just repeatedly pushed each other into the deadly pit so they die, and then they saved them by touching them… then push them down again, really torturing each other. And I was thinking like Jeez, these players are just gods in a top-down kind of abstract game, just ruthless and cruel. And I was very disappointed because the game has been designed about helping each other, and we told the people you’re supposed to help each other, but they still couldn’t resist their basic instinct to torture each other. And so I was really really sad at the time.

And one day I run into a child psychologist and tell her about my experiment. And she said actually, that makes sense, because your game is so abstract. Even though they are adults and have moral values, when they go through this abstract world, they don’t really carry moral value into abstract space. And so to you, and to the game, these adults are no different from babies who were just born. And she was saying babies are just seeking reward, basic input-output relationship, so if the baby… was slamming a spoon against the table repeatedly because it generates feedback and it was satisfying for them to make it louder and louder, and some parent was yelling at the baby to ask the baby to stop, but to the baby, she might think the yelling is a stronger feedback, like ‘Oh, people are paying attention to me, I better keep doing this.’ They don’t have the context that the feedback is actually punishment. Once they actually build up the context that’s a punishment, then they stop doing it.

So what happened in the collision incident is that when we offered the collision, people started to experiment with it like a baby. And when you push people around, what’s the maximum amount of feedback you can get? And that’s killing someone, when they die they release a dying call which is very loud, and they will change state and be dead, and you can revive them, and it’s the biggest reward you can get for pushing someone. It’s more rewarding than pushing someone against the wind or up the rock. That’s why the players keep doing it, because they like more feedback.

So realizing that really it had nothing to do with moral value, it just had to do with feedback, because everybody is just a baby in the game. So we said what’s the least amount of feedback we can give for pushing each other, which is nothing. So we actually removed the collision, so… nobody started to think about it any more.

So my biggest lesson learned is that human behavior may appear to be a bad moral behavior, but it’s not really their fault; they’re just following their instinct. It is the designer who creates the system who has the responsibility to moderate the right behavior you want. By providing feedback for the things you want to see and by providing zero feedback on the things you don’t want to see, you can actually quite control the moral value in the game…. It’s really the system that’s defining the people’s behavior, rather than that person himself is better or worse.

I was disappointed at online gamers initially, but then I was disappointed with the way people designed online games — you can actually make them a much nicer place.