Will Wright
HiveMind is the name of legendary video game creator Will Wright‘s next big thing. And it sounds it’s going to send privacy freaks into a fetal position, crying for their mommies.
Best known as the mind behind SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, Will Wright always seems to find himself on the bleeding edge of video game entertainment. Many of his titles have spawned entirely new genres of gaming, and HiveMind sounds no different. According to an exclusive over at Games Beat, HiveMind will invent a new genre called “personal gaming,” where the game uses cell phones, social networks, and more to learn about you and tailor-make what sounds sort of like an ARG (augmented reality game) out of your habits, hobbies, and tastes.
According to the Games Beat article:
[Wright] noted, for instance, that there may be 50 different dimensions to a person that could be learned through data collection. Some of those dimensions could be location-based, like where you are, where your friends are, and how much money is in your wallet… Wright’s idea with HiveMind is to collect data so that the game can discover opportunities for a person to have fun, directing the person to the right place where they could enjoy themselves, based on their interests.
If HiveMind knows enough about you, it could find local events for you that you might enjoy. Wright isn’t going into great detail about the game yet, but he expects it to work on many levels, from things like matchmaking with like-minded individuals, to enhancing your fitness goals, and much more.
Wright hopes that HiveMind will “make reality more interesting to you,” by turning you into the game. The idea isn’t to distract you from real life, as most video games do, it’s to engage you in it in a way that’s more enjoyable. (One assumes that an ecosystem such as this will come with built-in security features.)
HiveMind has no projected release date yet and is still in the early stages of its production. Does it sound like something that you’d want to play?
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