Last year, the organisers of the annual Game Developers Conference organised a design challenge for three big industry names - Will Wright (the Sims), Warren Spector (Deus Ex) and Raph Koster (Creative Director at Sony Online Entertainment). The trio were directed to come up with a game concept based around a love story, and then discuss and extend their idea in front of a conference audience. You can find out what happened here.
The challenge was so popular, it's returning for this year's event, with previous winner, Will Wright, taking on two new competitors. The theme? Well, in the style of Big Brother, GDC has gone evil - the trio are going to have to come up with game design concepts based around... the poetry of prolific nineteenth century loner Emily Dickinson.
The idea is to explore the concept of the license - does building a game around a brand unavoidably inhibit creativity? It will be fascinating to see whether the designers can come up with any answers that are as applicable to conversions of brain dead movie blockbusters as they are to the works of one of America's finest poets.
As for the logistics of the competition, it's probably up to the competitors whether they base their game around the process of writing poetry (with the player taking on the role of Dickinson, perhaps), or around one of her many works. Considering the latter, Dickinson is not such an outlandish choice for this exercise - her obsession with themes of mortality and human suffering would have bagged her a design role with most major studios if she'd have been born 150 years later.
So a quick hot topic: which poem or poet would you like to see a game based around? Personally, I'd go for the metaphysical survival horror of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven…
