When gamers associate your name with ground-breaking classics like SimCity, The Sims, and Spore, they expect radical ideas in your newest ventures. Master game designer Will Wright insists that's the case with his most recent project, explaining that, "Stupid Fun Club is ready to bring a new variety of playful experiences to mobile/local/social."

SXSW recently sat down with two of Wright's key lieutenants at Stupid Fun Club, Reality Architect Tish Shute and Producer Peter Swearengen. Shute heads up research and development for the mobile/social/local focus of Stupid Fun Club, while Swearengen brings extensive transmedia experience to the group from his work in television and past Wright projects, including Spore. Shute and Swearengen will be speaking on "A Lifestyle with a Gaming Sense" at the Palmer Events Center March 10 at 3:30.

Swearengen explains how his work on Bar Karma, a television venture with Wright, led to the Storymaker platform that he'll discuss at SXSW, "We're looking deeper into ways for people to share stories, to create individual stories and then branch off to create variations on each other's stories. So together we can create a collective story." One of the key functions of Storymaker is providing users with the ability to curate the storylines through recommending, sharing, and voting procedures.

Shute adds that, "Really we've entered a new era where the world has become a platform for storytelling and the goal is to turn everyday life into an opportunity for play, relatedness, and new forms of autonomy and fun. We've now come to a point where software has moved out of the computer and into the world. Rather than viewing this process in terms we've already grown out of, like gamification, we view this as an opportunity to explore everyday activities as possibility spaces."

Shute explains that the key with mobile and local play is catching the real world serendipity of the moment in order to help people relate to new experiences as they happen. For the folks at Stupid Fun Club, these new systems of collaborative storytelling and mobile/local/social design are about establishing the algorithmic backbone that will empower people to curate everyday life just as they curate their web presence via social circles, likes, and photo collections. Come March, they'll share just how Stupid Fun Club will make us curators of our own playful experiences.

Contributed by Michael Trice, photos of Will Wright, Tish Shute and Peter Swearengen by Anya Zavarzina