A Mind Forever Voyaging

The Good
The only text adventure game I've ever liked; A Mind Forever Voyaging is not played, it's experienced. Infocom was famous for their statement regarding graphical games, which I quote here: "You'll never see Infocom's graphics on any computer screen. Because there's never been any computer built by man that could handle the images we produce. And there never will be. We draw our graphics from the limitless imagery of your imagination - a technology so powerful, it makes any picture that's ever come out of a screen look like graffiti by comparison." I think most gamers reading this would disagree, but there's no denying they made some genius games and this is perhaps their crowning achievements.

The plot has similarities to Stephen King's The Dead Zone. Taking place in 2031, A Mind Forever Voyaging depicts a dystopian future world where crime, war, pollution, poverty etc are going through the stratosphere. But a charismatic man in the US senate, Richard Ryder, is trying to change all that. Like the politician in King's novel, he proposes sweeping reforms to tax, employment and draft laws that will effectively turn the US into a police state. Understandably, there is a lot of controversy over Ryder's plan and more data is needed before anyone will green light it.

These events coincide with the creation of the world's first sentient computer, which happens to be you. You've lived 20 years of your life as an average suburban man, until one day a scientist walks into your life and explains that you are not in fact human but a computer program who is living in a simulated world in a computer lab. Since Ryder is pushing his plan so aggressively, you must travel into an alternate future (created through another simulation) to see if the plan would actually work. Once you've collected enough information, you must return to the real world and make a report to the scientists.

If you think that's a crazy idea for a game, you've got it in one. AMFV is very different from your usual text adventure. There are NO puzzles (except for a small one at the end) and very little dialogue. It's possible to die, but since the game takes place in a simulated world you can simply jack back in. This game is about exploring and observing. Are the people happy? Is the economy strong? Is the government abusing its power?

Since AMFV is experienced rather than played, it's kind of hard to call it a game at all. The term "interactive novel" may carry a lot of negative connotations these days but that's what this is. It's a captivating experience that defies comparison to almost any other game. One of the coolest things is that you can slip in and out of the same city at varying times in the future. Sure, maybe things look fine 10 years from now. But what about 20? 40? 80? In one of the alternate futures you visit there's been a nuclear war and you must fight off attacks from zombies and mutant dogs. I'm telling you, this game is weird.

But it's not a completely random excursion into dreamland either. There's a strong plot tying everything together and AMFV is quite politically sensitive next to other Infocom games, particularly in its criticism of right-wing conservatism. And the cynical way in which it looks at mankind's utopia dreams meant the game was billed as the world's first serious speculative fiction game, and regardless of that statement's truth there is a lot of similarity between AMFV and the hard SF novels of the 50s and 60s.

In the Infocom tradition you get a box of feelies (including a ballpoint pen, a fictional magazine from the future, and a color wheel allowing you to crack the game's copy protection). AMFV also comes with a professionally written novella detailing your character's "life" that is so good you could seriously publish it, never mind the crappy 800-word intros that get shoved in game manuals these days. "Less is more", who the hell came up with that idea?

The Bad
Nothing, unless you want to get petty and complain about the game's complexity (there's a huge vocabulary of several thousand words and a lot of your time is spent typing in synonyms) and its often-dubious interactivity. Like I said, it's a long stretch to call AMFV a game.

The Bottom Line
A weird-ass adventure game, AMFV is almost one of a kind. Now regarded as one of the greatest games in the Infocom canon, but curiously underrated all the same, there will perhaps never be another game like AMFV.

What if AMFV had graphics? To be honest, I'm not sure whether I would have enjoyed it as much. Perhaps this is a game best experienced with your imagination.