Maybe it was a USB Emily Dickenson, or even worse, a USB Slavoj Žižek?

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/gdc-panel-tackling-the-emil...

>Will Wright, the creative mastermind behind SimCity and The Sims, spoke last, charming the crowd with a fluid mix of academic design insight and brash humor. "I'm convinced that if she was alive today, she'd be an Internet addict," Wright began. Citing television show Futurama as a key influence, Wright presented his idea for an Emily Dickinson desktop agent. Wright explained that, like a mix between Tamagotchi, the Microsoft Paper Clip, and Seaman, the Dickinson agent would be moody, portable, dependent, somewhat annoying, and observant of all your computer-based actions.

>Wright envisioned that the agent could be sold on USB memory sticks, in order to cleverly "backdoor" the program to unsuspecting customers. "USB Emily," as Wright dubbed the agent, would then interact with the user via IM, e-mail, and pop-up messages. USB Emily might snoop into the user's programs and documents in order to find keywords to comment upon or send poems about. Over time, the user would "slowly bootstrap a relationship with her."

>Referencing some of the emotional problems from which Dickinson suffered, Wright explained, "I want to put the player in the role of her psychotherapist." In one scenario, the player might help USB Emily through her problems and eventually befriend her. But in the two "degenerate cases," USB Emily might either become romantically obsessed with the user (a reference to her often erotic poetry) or fall into a suicidal depression (in which case the program might delete itself).

http://games-beta.slashdot.org/story/05/03/10/1723254/emily-...

>Will Wright's was the final design up for consideration, and was a truly inspired idea. It included such charts as the one to the left, showing the overlap between Emily Dickinson readers and GTA players.

>Then he put forth his goals. He wanted to have the mood dependency and portability of a Tamagotchi, the helpful/annoyance of Clippy, and the relationship and creepy aspects of seaman.

>What he came up with was USB Emily Dickinson. The game would be a small program bundled with a USB memory drive, which is now a large business and an almost impulse buy. The "Emily" program would sit on the drive, and would occasionally interact with you in order to begin to derive an emotional relationship with you.
* These interactions would include Instant Messaging, email, and interruptions while writing. Over time, the program would develop a model of behavior depending on how you'd interacted with it. Will's thought was that, while you could eventually get her to a stable state it was more likely that she'd become romantically obsessed with you, or suicidally depressive. In the latter case, he said, she would have the option of deleting herself off the USB drive.

>To respect the license idea, again, Wright opined that the program could be adapted for any famous figure, and to have many different USB individuals operating on the same computer. If you had enough ports you could even have them interact with each other through natural language generation. Thus, you could slot drives to view a conversation between Marx, Twain, and Homer Simpson. While all of the ideas were stellar, Wright took home the first prize for the second year in a row.