about HiveMind.
Game On: What are your thoughts on the success we’ve seen in the U.S. this year, with Major League Gaming and eSports attracting huge live crowds and streaming audiences?
Will Wright: Well, it’s something that’s actually been around for a while in countries like Korea, and we’re starting to get more gamer culture television programming on G4 and that kind of stuff. If you look at some of the game shows out there like Ninja Challenge. These things are looking more and more like games…even the pure television shows. We’ve obviously had this model for a long, long time in professional sports and we never really thought of gaming in that way. There’s always been a very big wall between gaming and sports. It’s taken a long time for people who started thinking of videogames as a spectator sport as opposed to something you often do personally. When you look at any of these major sports, it took decades for them to grow viewership and fans and formats and leagues and basically put the show biz in watching these things. I think videogames are recapitulating that in some sense.
Source: SimCookie
I’ve really lost interest in his work these days. He seems to be going in such banal directions.
To be honest – I agree. Didn’t really care for Bar Karma, don’t really care for this. He really needs to go back to what he is the master of – Simulation (Maxis)
I think he’s trying to avoid being “typecast” to simulation games, or ironically thumb his nose as EA/Sims series as it were. Like his being at Linden Labs/working on 2nd Life. That was definately a “mud in your eyes” type move after leaving EA, course it could also be grasping at straws trying to find the next big thing that outdoes the Sims, which It (sims) has been around for 11-12 yrs and nothing has ever come close, it doesn’t even have rivals of a similar vein in its catagory. (unlike the racing games GT or NfS, or MGS – CoD, GoW…god, there’s too many knock-offs in that genre) which brings me to wonder why there aren’t more “Sims” type knock-off games out there? EA bought up all it’s competition?