Bungie is aiming to foil the trolls in Destiny

Online shooting games can be toxic arenas that reward aggressive behavior. But Bungie is hoping to change all that with in-game social implementations for Destiny.

In an interview with Edge, Bungie technical director Chris Butcher said that the developers are working to reward positive social behavior in online games.

"If you look back at online multiplayer gaming for the last ten years, the dominant thread has been adolescent males shooting each other in the face and squatting on each other's corpses," he said. "That emerges from design decisions. The community gets attracted towards that, and that is popular to a lot of other people and so it tends to exclude others."

Butcher wants the game's mapping of in-game gestures like waving and dancing to encourage more collaboration and friendliness, and less posturing and aggression.

"I don't think you can ever design toxic behavior out, but what you can do is prevent them being able to ruin other players' experiences," he said. "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."