"HiveMind" will track users in order to make them part of the game
Playing "The Sims" can be a nice break from reality through the creation of fictional characters in a world where you can do pretty much anything you want, but the game's designer is looking to add our personal realities to the mix in a new game called "HiveMind."
Will Wright, the designer responsible for "The Sims" and "Spore," has shared some details on the new game "HiveMind," which is a group of cross-platform, cross-media online applications. It will place the user as the lead character within the game, and instead of playing ourselves in an alternate world, the game will be based on our real world and the places we visit everyday.
To do this, "HiveMind" will collect data and personal information on the user via social networks, smartphones, tablets and computers. Using this information, the "HiveMind" user can track where they are, what they're doing, and who they're doing it with.
"If we had that much situational awareness about you and at the same time we were building this very high-level map of the world, and I don't just mean where Starbuck's is, but all sorts of things like historical footnotes and people you might want to meet. I started thinking about games that we can build that would allow us to triangulate you in that space and build that deep situational awareness," said Wright. "There will be all types of games, but the key will be focusing the experiences, including multiplayer, within the real world and away from the fictional world that games currently invest in."
Of course, privacy will become a main concern with playing such a personal game. Certain applications that track people on smartphones and tablets have ticked users off in the past, and social networking giant Facebook has taken a lot of heat over the past few years for its constant privacy breaches.
"That's something that obviously they would opt in for, so it's not like you'd be stealing the info," said Wright. "They would want to play the game. It's the same thing with the ARGs [Alternate Reality Games] that are out there. We need to get the players on our side. Every time we gather some data about them, we need to reflect it back to an experience that got much better so they understand. Once we get them on board, hopefully they're very forthcoming and they get more involved in terms of how they're feeling and what they're doing. The system can actually be used by them and benefit them with the more accurate data it collects."
There is currently no release date for "HiveMind" at this time.
Source: MSNBC
"You can bet that Sony built a long-term business plan about being successful in Japan and that business plan is crumbling." -- Peter Moore, 24 hours before his Microsoft resignation
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