Linden Lab Board Member Will Wright is Creating HiveMind, a Game That Connects to Your Real Life (Somehow)

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has a big scoop on HiveMind, a new game project from "game god" Will Wright, who recently joined the advisory board of Linden Lab. Details are pretty vague at this point, but in very broad detail, it seems to be an entertainment platform that connects your real life interests with those around you to a karmic system and a dynamic game structure. Or as Wright puts it to Dean:

“If we can learn enough about the player, we can create games about their real life. How do we get you more engaged in reality rather than distract you from it? This has to do with where gaming is going. We had our eras in console gaming and social gaming. A lot of this personal gaming will happen on mobile devices. The question here is how can we learn enough about the player to create games about his or her real life.”

Interested to see how this develops. A lot of our real lives, of course, happen online, often in online worlds like Second Life. So I wonder if we'll see SL and the new project Linden Lab is working on integrate with HiveMind as well. Anyway, read more here.

Comments

[Missy Restless]

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[Metacam Oh]

Congrats Metacam for your third red bull today. +20 diabetes points!

[Melponeme_k]

I guess Borgmind would have garnered too many IP lawsuits.

[Alisha]

Creepy.
I think the new game is keeping our rl data out of these systems.
-100 points for being stingy about my pirivacy.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I don't know. I'm very protective of my pseudonymity. But I see potential here.

Will is one of a small pantheon of gaming gods that changed the face of video gaming (and I hope he's not reading this, because the last thing he needs is more praise).

If he decides to use his powers to advance the human condition (and not fish for lucrative product tie-ins), he has the chops to envision and execute something that could do just that. The potential of HiveMind to harness the community's collective energy, insights and resources to help resolve individual problems has the potential to do a huge amount of good in the world.

It also has potential for bad, just like any other tool. But I rather have the tool available and give people the choice of whether and how to use it, than to deny them the opportunity.

[Amanda Dallin]

When I'm using SL or a computer game I want to be distracted from RL. When I want to play RL I log off and don't need Mr. Wright's help to play it.

[shockwave yareach]

I will never permit Hivemind, Facebook, SL, or anyone else to monitor my comings and goings in RL. If I wanted someone to know everything I'm doing every minute of the day, I'd sew a GPS into my underwear. My life is my business -- it's not something for other people to collect and sell to make themselves a buck from.