Emily Dickinson Online

Emily Goes Online - NYTimes March 13, 2005

Daniel Terdiman, covering the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for Wired Online (www.wired.com), attended a panel of game designers who had been assigned to come up with ideas for an online game about Emily Dickinson. The panelists included Will Wright, the creator of the Sims series. Excerpts from Wired Online follow.

"If she were alive today, she'd be an Internet addict," Wright deadpanned, "and she'd probably have a really amazing blog."

At first, he said, he'd thought he would mix Dickinson's poetry into a Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas environment. Then came the idea to put the player in the role of Dickinson's therapist.

"As you interact with her, you start with a cordial relationship," he said. "She (either) becomes romantically obsessed with you, or goes into a suicidal depression, and at the end, she can delete herself ... ."

Along the way, Wright explained, Dickinson would reside in the player's computerized world, popping up from time to time with an e-mail, instant message, text message or desktop appearance. As an example, he showed the crowd a potential text message from Dickinson: "1t is b3tt3r t0 B th3 h4mm3r th4n th3 4nv1L" (geek writing for "it is better to be the hammer than the anvil").

NPR story on Emily Dickinson game