March 15, 2005

Battle for the Belle of Amherst

From wired magazine.

Extract:

"In this era of first-person shooters, successful video games seem to require lots of shooting, explosions and other assaults on the senses. But who says you can't write a game about the poetry of Emily Dickinson?"

Another one;

Wright, the speaker most people in the room had come to see, riffed on Dickinson's reputation as a recluse.
"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. But in the end, he was inspired to create a kind of combination of Tamagotchi and Microsoft's universally hated paperclip helper, Clippy.

Then came the idea to put the player in the role of Dickinson's therapist. The game, he said, would be stored on a USB flash drive.

"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 from the memory stick."

I don't know what to say..

I think it would be pretty funny if we all had flash memory therapists that functioned like clippy the paper clip.

Scenario: I am sitting at school and I have set myself the goal of writing 10 pages of a paper, and I am not leaving the campus until this is finished. Except now I am actually blogging with a guilty conscious and my clippy therapist, (What would the icon be? I guess there would have to be an assortment of therapeutic avaters: a moustache and a pipe, a cup of tea, a pair of birkenstocks, a notebook, a teddy bear, a glass of milk, a jade plant?? ) would pop-up and say;

"nu miriam, how are we feeling today?"

and I would type into the therapy modules response box;

"Angry tense, I hate school."

and the therapy avater would respond;

"Vell, you can select from one of the sefven vollowing options how is it you vant to proceed; you can; -....etc"

I remember when I was 9 and visited the Onatrio Science Centre religiously with my Dad, they had a computer psychiatrist. It would allow you to type responses to its questions, such as "How did that make you feel?" My friends and I used to (very creatively I am sure..), type lots and lots of swear words into the text bar and then the robot pyschiatrist would say; "Well that's not a very nice thing to say is it;"

Hopefully game design at this point has advanced to the stage where Ms Dickinson is allowed to swear at her therapist. Well, actually, since the player is the therapist it's actually up to them how they respond.

I am weirded out by the fact that instead of focusing on her brilliant poetry the game designers chose to deal with MS dickinson as a ravinig shut-in looney. I am not sure what that means. It makes me sad.

I wonder if the challenge had been to make a game about the poetry of Walt Whitman if the designers would have focused on his latent homosexuality or if they would have actually read the poetry and made up something creative and compelling for people to play rather than an extended joke about a closet case.

Maybe if it had been macho poet a Robert Bly type thing they could have just worked some of the texts into a plot about being a mighty hunter.

Did I mention angry and tense... nu miriam, go write your paper, and stop all this looking for trouble..

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