Will Wright, the creator of games such as The Sims and Sim City, announced in November 2011 a new game he has been working on called HiveMind. This particular game would be a cross-platform, cross-media game that you can literally play on just about every platform.We now know that this includes mobile phones and tablets as well.
HiveMind is an interesting game and one fitting to be created by the guy that has made games that echo your real life in some ways, like The Sims. HiveMind is a collection of cross-platform, cross-media applications which is designed to turn a gamer’s every day life into, essentially, a game. Your life becomes part of an interactive experience that’s built upon Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) which taps into your personal stream of information that you produce online over multiple platforms and media.
This sounds like the sort of game you watch movies about. The whole virtual reality meshing with real life type of deal except in this particular instance you don’t need to go to a virtual world to live in a game, the game is actually your real life instead. It is some pretty deep stuff if you think about it. It appears that any device connected to the internet will be able to be apart of HiveMind and this will include internet or SmartTVs as well.
The concept of HiveMind is pretty interesting. The game will customize itself to each individual player using by taking into account aspects of your real life situations and bringing it in as elements of the game. It takes it a step further with the sharing of interests, sort of like you already do on Social Media outlets already. It can also show you, based off your interests and the interests of others, things you might like around you in real life.
Unfortunately Will Wright isn’t going into deep detail about the game just yet and he hasn’t mentioned a time frame of when to HiveMind will be released. However, the concept has me rather interested and it will be interesting to see what applications this is all incorporated into. When more information is release we will be sure to post an update. For further information you can check out a couple of interviews with Will Wright which are linked below.
One thing to note, obviously there would be concerns with privacy and you will have to opt-in to sharing this data before being able to play the game. Granted most people already share a lot of this on Facebook and Twitter but it can go even deeper than that in HiveMind.
Websites Referenced: VentureBeat Interview | MSNBC Interview
