Spore and Sims creator Will Wright unveils Proxi
Build a world and AI out of your memories.
Will Wright led creation of SimCity and later The Sims, then he made the very ambitious evolution-themed simulation Spore. He's someone who thinks rather big. And he's unveiled a new game called Proxi, the mobile version of which is due late 2018 (no other platforms are named).
It's a simulation based around creating an artificial intelligence from your memories and then building a world out of them.
Here's Wright's lofty pitch:
"This is in some sense a game of self-discovery, a game where we actually uncover the hidden you - your subconscious, your inner ID, and bring it to the surface, bring it to life so you can interact with it, you can play with it, you can learn from it and it can learn about you.
"We do this primarily by pulling out the memories from your past, those unique things that happen in your life that make you who you are."
The Proxi website added the bit about tuning your own personal artificial intelligence - your own proxi. Apparently your memories - "mems" as they're known - are the building blocks of the world and AI.
A mem appears to be a bubbled scene of some sort, such as a parent and child playing a video game in front of a TV, or a sketch of a person with a broken bike. Apparently mems can be clumped together a bit like molecules and form themed areas, such as one for childhood, one for holidays, one for family and so on.
But how Proxi does all of this is unclear. A snippet of text on the Proxi website says, "I learn from the internet, from tweets, from friends", and is presented in a mobile SMS way. So does it pull data from social applications on our mobile devices?
It also sounds as though Will Wright and his small but experienced Gallium Artists team still have some fairly big questions to answer, such as what the mems are actually going to look like. Examples of what Wright would like the game to look like can be seen at the end of the video above. To this end, there's a Unity art competition running to find a talented Proxi artist. Feels a bit late in the day considering the game is due later this year.
Still, as with everything Will Wright, Proxi sounds interesting. Spore's procedurally-generated worlds might not have captured our world in the way The Sims did, but it was a grand gaming experiment nonetheless.