Meet the video-game designer hoping to bring players to tears

#TIA – This man’s betting on compassion and kindness to sell his video games. Good luck with that. 

Jenova Chen is an innovative video game designer who describes himself as “a digital monk.” What he means by this is that he’s trying to cultivate peace, compassion and personal transformation through a medium that’s often blamed for cultivating baser human instincts like aggression and violence.

Chen became interested in peaceful gaming when he fell in love with a fictional character. His first love was Zhao Ling’er, a girl in the popular Chinese video game Legend of Sword and Fairy. She haunted his thoughts when he was a teenager, eventually inspiring him to create critically acclaimed games like Flow, Flower, and Journey that have changed the gaming industry. He’s now president of thatgamecompany, founded in 2006, which makes video games that focus on evoking sensations and provoking emotional transformation, operating like novels or films or poetry.

Read more at Quartz