Now, the catch is, the virtual Emily Dickinson would interact with the player in multiple ways. She might send you emails, just like her correspondence in real life. She might pop-in and send you instant messages (Wright put up a slide with a simulated conversation that had the audience in hysterics.) Or, like that annoying Microsoft Office paperclip, she might pop up on your desktop with comments on what you were doing. Are you reading a page about birds? She might quote some of her bird poetry to you. Reading the news? She might offer to read you a poem, and then ask you how it made you feel. Your responses would affect your relationship with her.

In an interesting experiment, Wright showed what it would look like if the virtual Emily Dickinson dynamically used Google image search to illustrate one of her poems. The result worked eerily well, displaying images that were either appropriate, haunting, ironic, or pure comedy.

Wright carried his thought experiment out by saying that you could load up all kinds of virtual personalities onto memory sticks. He ended his presentation with a fictional dialogue between a virtual Karl Marx, a virtual Mark Twain, and a virtual Homer Simpson. People were in stitches.

Wright imagines an instant-message dialogue with the virtual Emily...

And the Winner Is...

The winner of the game designers challenge is determined by audience applause. Who took the prize? For the second year in a row, it was Will Wright! But still, I have to wonder: did he earn the applause by having the best game, or were people making noise just because they wanted to make sure he came back again next year? For my money, Clint Hocking's "Muse" game concept was the most workable -- it was an intriguing concept that would actually make a very cool game. Of course, there were no losers here: the crowd of would-be game designers got to see how different people explore ideas.

And hey, any time you get a group of gamers together to talk about, of all things, Emily Dickinson poetry -- well, that in and of itself is an accomplishment. I'm already looking forward to next year's challenge!