(2011-06-06) Wright ManekiNeko HiveMind

Will Wright is working on a Computer Game based on Maneki Neko - actually an ARG?!?

• Jan'2012: it's going to be called "HiveMind". While the technology and data collection is in place, the game doesn't yet have a release date.
• Jun'2012: there's a big lawsuit tying things up. Jawad Ansari, Hive Mind’s first chief executive, is in litigation with the company to protect his 30 percent equity. He was replaced by the directors, which included Wright and Raj Parekh, managing diector of Redwood Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
• Nov'2012: lawsuit settled
• Jun'2013: will his new Syntertainment startup move this (or something similar) out to market?
• Sept'2013: Syntertainment raised $5M from A16Z and others. The company will not use the same ideas that Wright talked about with his two previous startups, the Stupid Fun Club and the now shut-down Hive Mind. The Stupid Fun Club is now a shell company that has licensed some of its projects. But Hive Mind ran into a legal dispute among founders, and Wright settled litigation related to it.
  • Mar'2014: CoFounder Avi Bar Zeev has left.
• May'2015: Syntertainment launches THRED IOS Photo Sharing/Story Telling app. Gaming (Computer Game) wasn't the initial Metaphor that inspired Wright to help create Thred, Comic Book-s were. "My initial conception was to take the data we have about you and start turning your life it into a Graphic Novel," he says. "How do we take these different sources of data about you and turn it into a visual story or visual record?" That spark of an idea was born of the concept of quantimetrics or the Quantified Self, Wright says.
  • Thred was a social media story-telling platform created by Will Wright, the master mind behind The Sims. Though it only lasted for three glorious months, it lives on in the hearts of the content creators.
• Mar'2016: Wright has funded "Gallium Artistic Services". CTO Lauren Winter says This is his next thing, SimYou. You, the human, are now going to be the Sim (LifeBox)... we started with the idea of a human memory, which is a tag-based memory with people, places, things, times and activities. 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. Lauren was at Syntertainment, too. Her LinkedIn profile says The game utilizes the players life memories to motivate an AI simulated entity and a world construction play-space. The stack includes a Python endpoint server and Neo4j graph database utilizing Machine Learning and AI micro-services running on AWS servers. Our iOS native client procedurally generates interactive OpenGL ES 2D graphics and the players world is built with Apple 3D SceneKit.
  • She left Gallium as of end-2019 to join Esri.
• Mar'2018: new-name Proxi game is announced. By visually representing your memories in Proxi, Wright hopes that players will be able to learn from their experiences more thoroughly, and that the game will learn from the player, as well. (Hah this reminds me of MindMirror.)
• Mar'2021 calling for involvement by Sims modders. “Gallium’s tool for creators is a Unity Plug-in that lets artists create assets that will be available in the marketplace for Gallium games.”
• (2021-09-30) The Sims Creator Is Releasing An NFT Game That Plays On Your Subconscious