Bungie Designing Destiny to Counter ‘Toxic Behavior’

Online multiplayer is often a wasteland of inconsiderate jerks. While that's likely never going to change, at least Bungie is thinking about changing the way people interact online in Destiny.

In an interview with Edge, Bungie technical director Chris Butcher talked about some of the behavioral changes the developer hopes to encourage in Destiny.

“If you look back at online multiplayer gaming for the last ten years I think the dominant thread has been adolescent males shooting each other in the face and squatting on each other’s corpses,” Butcher said. “And that emerges from design decisions which… some of which were intentional, some of which were not, but the community gets attracted towards that, and that is popular to a lot of other people and so it kind of tends to exclude others.”

Butcher admits he doesn't believe this type of attitude will change 100 percent overnight, he at least hopes the things the developer is doing with Destiny will start a shift to a more positive online experience.

“I don’t think you can ever design toxic behavior out, you can’t ever stop players from being toxic but what you can do is prevent them being able to ruin other players’ experiences,” Butcher added. “You give people these tools that encourage them to interact positively with each other and then if someone is interacting negatively with you, well, they can’t ruin your experience.”

Until Destiny arrives, we won't know for sure just how it will affect online attitudes, but at least Bungie is attempting to adjust some of the issues it helped create with the Halo franchise.