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Will Wright, the designer of The Sims and co-founder of Maxis, appeared on Twitch today to talk about his next game, Proxi, which is “an AI life sim built from your memories” according to this teaser trailer released last month. During the stream on BreakthroughT1D’s channel, a gaming and streaming initiative that raises money for type 1 diabetes research, Wright revealed more about Proxi as well as discussing the development of The Sims series.
In Proxi, you type in a memory (for example, a trip you took with a college buddy) and the game turns that memory into an animated scene. As you create more memory scenes they’re added to your “mind world,” a 3D environment you can explore and play games in. The people who are part of your memories (like that college buddy you told Proxi about) will populate the world as “proxies” that you can interact and play games with.
“I don’t remember when I first thought of [Proxi],” Wright said on the stream. “I think it’s more like an idea that was percolating for a long time. Obviously it has a lot of relationship to The Sims.”
Case in point: as Twitch hosts Arielehm and Emily Morganti played The Sims 2 on the stream, the character of Mortimer Goth got frightened by the ghost of Victor Goth (Mortimer’s dead relative) after visiting the graveyard. Using the memories panel, the hosts could see that Mortimer retained that memory, along with other important events and milestones from his life.
Wright explained why he wanted Proxi to be a more personal experience by using the real memories of its players. “I found myself getting continuously closer and closer to the player,” Wright said.”Kind of a saying I’ve lived by, which is that no game designer has ever gone wrong by overestimating the narcissism of their players.”
As the hosts laughed, Wright explained further: “It goes to figure that the more I can make a game about you, the more you’ll like it,” he said, chuckling.
Wright said all this rather playfully, but look, he’s not wrong: I’ve created versions of myself in just about any game that will let me, including every one of Wright’s The Sims games. Hell, I’ve bought games, created myself in the character creator, and then never even bothered to play the actual game.
Thing is, I usually create myself in games so that I can have an adventure I wouldn’t have in real life, so I’m not entirely sold on the idea of creating myself and then immediately saddling this digital version of me with the same memories I’m already carrying around in my big dumb head. But who knows? Maybe I’m just self-absorbed enough to recreate not just myself in Proxi, but my memories too.
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Kurt Indovina
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