Will Wright begins any game design problem by free-associating ideas. So when he set out to solve this challenge he jotted down all the thoughts that sprang to mind when he thought of an Emily Dickinson game.
But first he pointed out that Emily Dickinson, if she were alive today, would've loved the Internet. A recluse who wrote tons of letters and journals, she'd send email all day and "would have a killer blog," Wright suspects.
Wright suspected there wasn't much overlap between the typical gamer and Dickinson's fans...
Free associating, Wright jotted down scattered thoughts: Would the game be about Emily or her poetry? Text is boring in computer games, should he work around it? Do you respect the license or not? Is Dickinson mass market? And the most important question of all: why should he (Will Wright) care enough to design a game around it?
Ultimately the last two questions answered each other: the idea appealed to Will because he thought it would be an amazing accomplishment to make a mass market learn (and care about) Emily Dickinson.
Wright decided that he wanted the game to be about Emily herself, and that the terrain he really wanted to explore was people's relationships with Emily. He was reminded of the heads in a jar used in the cartoon Futurama. What if we could all interact with Emily Dickinson?
Wright starts off any project by cataloging all his ideas and inspirations...
What Wright needed was a way to slip Emily Dickinson into people's lives unexpectedly. A sort of poetic Trojan horse. While considering this problem, he noticed his USB memory card sticking out of his computer, and it struck him. Those things are everywhere! He figured if he could get a virtual Emily Dickinson down to 10MB or less, he could have it shipped with all those little USB memory sticks as a selling point.
He called it "USB Emily," for "Unstable Synthetic Brain."
The player, then, would be like Emily's confidant or psychotherapist. Wright drew a triangle showing the possible relationships you could develop with your virtual Emily Dickinson: You'd start as just a cordial friend. Nurture your relationship wisely and you move to one end of the triangle, "Respected Friend." Or you could end up at a different vertex, where Emily would become romantically obsessed with you. The third point was "Suicidal," where Wright joked that she might delete her own program from your memory stick. Of course, you might end up at any spot along this spectrum: in-between "Romantically Obsessed" and "Suicical" was an area labeled as "Creepy."
