The Sims designer Will Wright is making his next life sim more personal by building it with your actual memories: 'No game designer has ever gone wrong by overestimating the narcissism of their players'

Three people chatting in a digital world

(Image credit: Gallium Games)

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.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.