Will Wright announces HiveMind, an upcoming game project described like so: "a group of cross-platform, cross-media online applications, is designed to turn a gamer's everyday life into part of the interactive experience by building upon Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and tapping into streams of personal information on phones, tablets, social networks and computers." Word is some of the underlying technology for this is already in place, but this does not yet have a release date. Here's a bit from the included Q&A:

Q: How would a game experience work?

A: "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."

Q: What are the personal privacy challenges that exist with creating a game around players' personal data?

A: "That's something that obviously they would opt in for, so it's not like you'd be stealing the info. They would want to play the game. It's the same thing with the ARGs that are out there. We need to get the players on our side. Every time we gather some data about them, we need to reflect it back to an experience that got much better so they understand. Once we get them on board, hopefully they're very forthcoming and they get more involved in terms of how they're feeling and what they're doing. The system can actually be used by them and benefit them with the more accurate data it collects."