As most Sim players probably remember, after creating the Sims franchise, Will Wright abandoned us several years ago to work on Spore instead. The original promise of Spore was "The Sims, but it starts at the beginning of evolution and ends with space travel." That was a pretty amazing premise, and I for one was super stoked.

 

Of course, my enthusiasm waned after several years of Spore's release date being pushed back. For at least two years, Spore was going to be released "six months from now."

 

When it finally did hit the shelves, the restrictions of our boring old reality had greatly circumscribed it. And I suspect that a lot of clueless executives had their hands in the pot, because instead of being a free-range sandbox game (like the Sims franchise), Spore was all goal-based. I played it for about two weeks before I got bored.

 

Wright has been quiet for quite some time, but his new project was recently announced. And it, um… I'll be honest with you. It sounds quite frankly terrible.

 

Called Hivemind, Wright says that his game will "harvest players' personal information and turn that data into customized gameplay situations." Like if Facebook, seeing that you enjoyed watching The Walking Dead on AMC, pushed you to a zombie minigame. 

 

The focus on your personal information is unsettling, to say the least. In order for Hivemind to work, you will apparently need to feed it as much information about you as possible. Just to give you an idea of where I'm coming from on this, I am something of a privacy nut. I deleted my Facebook account after the fourth "we updated the privacy settings and didn't tell you that all your stuff is public" incident, along with having learned that Facebook never really deletes your data when you tell it to - it just hides it from your view.

 

Data mining personal information is the wave of the future. By which I mean "the wave of the future of advertising." You can try and harness that force for good, which is what it sounds like Wright is doing. But I'm pretty sure someone will end up using it for evil anyway. The money involved is just too juicy.

 

I also detect a whiff of patronizing in Wright's description. Wright says that "the goal here is to stimulate a player's interest in [his or her] own life." Like if you were playing Sims 3, and it encouraged you to do your own dishes, you lazy slob.

 

Um yeah… no thanks! I'll be curious to see how this pans out, though.