There’s that character in the Truman Show, that director, played by Ed Harris,” says Will Wright. “Imagine if you had somebody like that behind you, trying to make your life more interesting and dramatic. That’s what I’d like to have.”
The veteran developer, mastermind behind such concepts as freeform urban sandbox Sim City and Spore – the latter of which enabled players to micromanage the evolution of a whole species from singe-celled organism to galaxy-conquering warlords – is attempting to describe his latest idea. Comparing it to the sinister puppet master behind the fate of a character imprisoned in a lifelong reality TV show might not be the most auspicious start, but hey, Wright reminds us: “You could turn it off if you want to.”
That’s still not much comfort, but Wright insists that HiveMind is a game – or rather games, as it’s actually a multifaceted experience across several platforms, including mobile and social networking – that seeks to intrude on our daily lives in an entirely benevolent way.
“One of the things I really want to do is have these games expose portions of reality to someone that they’re not aware of, but that are immediately accessible to them,” Wright explains. “If you imagine opportunities and things around you that maybe you don’t know about; there might be people you would meet or events you might go to, or places you would go check out. One of the key questions of this is ‘How do we make reality more interesting?’, rather than using games to distract you from reality.”
He continues: “We want to dig up a lot of information around you where you are, but in other dimensions, not just spatially but also to map from interests, map from time of day, the weather, how much money you want to spend, what’s on your schedule, all these things. If we take all these things into account, we can build a deep situational awareness abut the player. So we understand exactly what state they’re in, their mood, et cetera.”
It’s like Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and a Voight Kampff test rolled into one and left to run riot in a gamified real world, with seemingly infinite possibilities. Wright is convinced that the gameplay element of sharing will encourage a serious amount of information surrender from players, as they trade personal data for gameplay.
“We have the ability to build this very deep situational awareness around the individual, and reflect that value. So we want them to feel like, every time they give us a little bit of data, they’re getting something back. So, we’re trying to get them on our side there; we’re gathering the data for their benefit and their entertainment, not just to target advertisers to them.”
“And it’s not always got to come from the user,” he adds, “In fact we can have people that know you, close friends and family, giving us data about you, if they’re part of some game experience you’re collectively doing together.”
Wright’s belief that all this will come good, and that people will throw themselves into his social experiment, seems to be inspired closely by the founding ideals of his general aims as a developer throughout his career.
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