SimCity creator details his new game concept, presents an image of what games could be made with more personal information about players.
Will Wright, the developer behind seminal hits like SimCity and The Sims, left his long-time home at EA in 2009 to found Stupid Fun Club. While the world is waiting on the first game-related project from that outfit, Wright today revealed a second new startup, along with that outfit's first game.
Speaking with VentureBeat, Wright revealed HiveMind, which will serve as both the name of the new game and the new company. However, that's where the concrete details end.
Wright painted a picture of what a game could achieve if it was fed information about the player; it's a concept he calls "personal gaming." The idea revolves around the player completely, going so far as to dynamically build the game around each individual. "If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life," said Wright.
These concepts are things that Wright acknowledged are already at play in more superficial ways in augmented reality applications such as the check-in service Foursquare. However, he says that a person's location is just one of maybe 50 different dimensions of data that could be used to get an image of who a person is.
Wright provided an observation regarding his own work's trend toward being more personal as time goes on. "When you look at the arc of the games I have done, starting from SimCity, they are each mining a deeper level of creativity, and they are more focused on the individual over time," said Wright.
The state of HiveMind's development was not revealed. Wright is hoping that this announcement will spur investment so he and his team can build-out all of the necessary talent, applications, and systems needed to make a project of this scale possible.
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