A life sim where players collaboratively create memories for in-game avatars? It can only be a Will Wright game…
Last month, Maxis founder, The Sims creator, and one of the Great Elders of PC gaming, released a teaser trailer for his new game Proxi. The game could be described as a memory-focused life sim, as you flesh out the inner lives of your avatars (Proxies) by typing up their memories, which you can then play out in animated scenes within your “mind world.”
Wright revealed more about the game in a stream on BreakthroughT1D’s Twitch channel, which we partly covered yesterday, and expanded on the kind of things you’ll get up to in Proxi. He gave some examples of the interesting scenarios that Proxis memory creation system could throw up, and, in a soundbite for the ages, said: “I could have an amazing dinner party between Cleopatra, Napoleon, and Da Vinci, or I could have a cage match between Cleopatra and my grandmother.”
The way this will work, in theory, is that players create vast community-built entries for their Proxies, ‘almost like Wikipedia pages,’ that expand a character’s well of memories, which in turn informs how they behave in the game world. “There might be 100 people building the Wikipedia entries for Cleopatra… and have Cleopatra as a character in the game,” said Wright. The description on one of the slides for the game read ‘Trained with your memories, expanded with AI,’ so it looks like some degree of AI learning will be applied to the memory banks to help realise a given Proxi’s personality in-game.
The Proxies you’ll be able to create can be entirely fictional, or based on historical figures, or even on family members. One of the co-hosts talked about how they were researching the life of their late grandmother with their family, and how interesting it would’ve been had they been able to gather this person’s memories and stories, then apply them to this Proxi in the game. “That, to me, becomes almost like a software heirloom, something that you treasure like an old box of photos,” said Wright.
What you actually do in a gaming sense in Proxi still remains a bit of a mystery. It looks like Proxies interact with each other in a hex-based world, and you’ll apparently be able to create mini-games and export your Proxis to other games, but how does it all fit together? Still not sure. But hey, this is coming from a guy who made a pretty convincing ant simulator, as well as Spore, a game where you evolve a species from a single-cell amoeba to space-faring super race. High-concept ‘how will he make this work?’ sims are Wright’s whole wheelhouse, and he hasn’t let us down yet.
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