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Will Wright's HiveMind aims to turn humanity into The Sims — sort of

Will Wright's HiveMind aims to turn humanity into The Sims — sort of

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After a brief hiatus from the gaming industry — his last game was the ambitious-but-coolly-received Spore — legendary game designer and master of all things Sims Will Wright has announced HiveMind, the eponymous game from his new startup. And what exactly is HiveMind about? Well, that's tricky.

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Will Wright's head
Will Wright's head

After a brief hiatus from the gaming industry — his last game was the ambitious-but-coolly-received Spore — legendary game designer and master of all things Sims Will Wright has announced HiveMind, the eponymous game from his new startup. And what exactly is HiveMind about? Well, that's tricky.

Wright spoke with VentureBeat and offered very little, in terms of concrete details. He did, however, talk about his aims and goals with this "personal gaming" venture. HiveMind is driven by data collection — the same kind of data we've shown willingness to give to the likes of Facebook, for example — and the game will thusly learn from that and guide you to discover new interesting and entertaining events in real life.

Wright said the idea came when he stumbled upon a number of car enthusiasts meeting up to just talk. In his words:

"If I knew about these events, my life would be a lot more interesting... How do we expose you to these events, these things? How can we make a system that understands enough about you and gives you situational awareness? It could take into account what time of day it is, where you are, how much money is in your pocket. Imagine if you could open Google Maps and it shows you things that are interesting to you on the map."

He later provides another example where players could turn to friends to help accomplish goals — they could send message that try to get you to do something you need to do, and everyone would thusly rewarded. According to Venture Beat, Wright thinks that collectively people can help individual solve problems.

As with all of Wright's games, HiveMind starts out with a lot of ambitious underlining framework. What remains to be seen is any proof of concept, but rest assured, we're sure that's coming. Eventually.