Zonk, over on Slashdot, did a good job of covering the 2005 Game Design Challenge and its not so surprising outcome. The competition challenged Peter Molyneux, Will Wright and Chris Hocking to come up with a game using an Emily Dickinson license.

Hocking came up with a game that used the DS to recreate Emily Dickinson's poetry by becoming her muse. You basically get Emily to collect concepts from the world she roamed around in and then turned those concepts into a poem.

Molyneux came up with an actual demo of a game that he called The Room. In The Room you used virtual clay to create objects inside areas based on Dickinson's poems. Once you succeeded a line was read and you could move on to the next object.

Wright's idea was a stunner. He came up with something called USB Emily Dickinson. The idea was to stuff a virtual Dickinson into a USB drive and have her behave like a sort of complex Tamagotchi. When ever she is plugged into your computer she would send you emails, instant messages and basically annoy the shit out of you. Over time she would develop a personality and relationship with you. If she ended up becoming suicidal she would even have the option of deleting herself from the drive. He went on to say you could have other USB personalities and that if they were plugged into the same computer at the same time they could actually interact with each other. Brilliant! That man still has it.

Needless to say Wright took home the prize, for the second year in a row. Make sure you swing by Slashdot for pics and video from the presentation.

Emily Dickinson—The Game

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