Things have been quiet lately for Will Wright, creator of massively successful games SimCity, The Sims, Spore and others. Wright has since left Maxis to work at a new studio, Gallium Artistic Services. Based on a recent interview, we may have an idea of what the famed game designer is working on next.
Speaking to Neo4j, a graph database service, Lauren Winter mentioned Wright and Gallium Artistic Services are working on a new project called SimYou. Winter is the CTO at Gallium.
When speaking about SimYou, Winter said “ [y]ou, the human, are now going to be the Sim.” While that sounds like a lofty and ambiguous goal, Winter doesn’t really extrapolate on her comment. The interview is mostly about using graphs, after all.
Winter does go into some detail about how SimYou will be using these graphs, though. “We started with the idea of a human memory, which is a tag-based memory with people, places, things, times and activities,” she said. “But the most important part about the human mind, whether you know this or not, is not your memories. It’s your concept of things that the memories create.”
Using the example of a bicycle, Winter talks about all the different ways you can think of an object based on your past memories. “Your idea of a bicycle is built up from the first time you rode a bicycle, the first time you fell off a bicycle, the time you took a long tour on a bicycle, the time you escaped from mom and dad on a bicycle, etc. All of your memories of a bicycle shape your concept of a bicycle,” she said.
How does this make a game? Depending on your relationship to things, SimYou will change. “What’s really cool (which is kind of going to be the magic potion of this app) is that the concept of the bicycle – the link to it, relationship to it – is your relationship to bicycles,” Winter said. “It’s a connector unique to you. The bicycle is owned by every player in the game on planet earth, but now we know more than Amazon on how users relate to bicycles. We also know more than Facebook because they didn’t start with graph databases.”
This will allow you to see how you compare to others. “We know exactly what you like or dislike or hate or love in your life. Based on the weighting of all the relationships of all the memories of that one concept, then we can measure you against all humanity, to say whether you like bicycles a lot more than everyone else,” Winter said. “It’s sort of comparing people to everyone else. This is going to blow everyone’s mind.”
As for when we’ll find out more about SimYou, development is ongoing, but plans are to have everything ready by next year. “The project is only eight months old, and we haven’t launched yet, so I think in a year hopefully we’ll be launched and we’ll see,” Winter said.
So what do you think? Are you curious to find out more about SimYou? Will you wait until more information is released before getting yourself too invested? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.
