Depending on your age and affinity for computer games, you may be familiar with The Sims and other games that stemmed from that. These games allow you to create your own house, decorate it, choose your family, your spouse, amusement park and essentially play God.
Playing this game as a kid was always so much fun and no doubt brought developer, Will Wright, huge success as this was a groundbreaking idea for it’s time. Now, his new project is defying what our minds can comprehend as he hopes to intertwine our very own personal memories into the game, and he is asking for your help!
But, What Does This Mean?!
This game is called Proxi, built-in Unity by Wright and a team from Gallam Artists, it’s goal is to create rendered scenes that are entirely based off of your own unique and personal memories.
Wright is hoping that by visually representing your memories in the game, players will be able to learn through their past experiences and the game will continue learning from the player as well.
The video shows a few of these scenes in action, including a man fishing in a lake during a rainy day and a snow-covered log cabin. These are called “Mems” in the game, and multiple players will even be able to combine their memories to create a shared, more complex experience. Wright and Unity are looking for an artist to help them bring these memories to life as “tangible, visceral gameplay elements,” and it could be you.
To enter the contest, you must take three of your own personal memories and bring them to life with separate environmental scenes. Along with this, you’ll need to get all the scenes running in Unity to create a video, and you’ll need to submit an article detailing your creation projects. The art assets created must all be done by you, and they cannot be something you designed previously.
Judges for the contest include Wright himself, Pixar artist Matt Jones, Disney illustrator Bill Robinson, and Journey game designer Robin Hunicke.
Two winners will receive a grand prize, which includes round-trip flights to San Francisco to meet the development team, a private dinner and interview with the judges, licenses for Allegorithmic and Marmoset, and a bundle featuring shirts, games, and stickers from Wright’s projects.
In many ways merging technology with ourselves, physical or not is something to be especially wary of. However, if you can keep implants out of your head, share your own memories, and have the opportunity to relive and reenact past experiences that you always wished you could relive or have handled differently, perhaps this could be an effective way to finally heal from memories that haunt us?
Like anything, it’s all about perspective and it would depend on your intention going into this or if it even interests you. Personally, I could see how this could make the game more fun because it is specifically catered to you. This is far from an implant into your brain designed to extract your memories or thoughts, so overall, this does seem pretty harmless and obviously only those who are willing and choosing to take part will do so.
What are your thoughts? How do you feel about this? Do you think this is crossing the line down a slippery slope with AI and that we should take a step back? Or is this just harmless fun that is made possible by the incredible advancements in the gaming and tech industry? Let us know in the comments in the Collective Evolution Group on Facebook.