Will Wright’s Serendipity Machine

In a recent interview, game maker Will Wright shared some ideas his upcoming game HiveMind will be built around:

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. 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.

To me that sounds like he’s building a massive serendipity machine, not unlike the net machines and pokkecon in Bruce Sterling’s short story Maneki Neko. Should this work, then it would be more than a game. A real game changer, so to speak.

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