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"A man playing the part of a computer playing the part of a man."

As a teacher, I interact with young gamers everyday, and boy does it make me feel old. I can understand if they’re unfamiliar with a game that stood as a watershed moment in my own young life, but it’s strange to me (though understandable) that they can be ignorant of entire genres of games. Entire BRANCHES of genres. The only 2-D platformers they know are Gameboy games. They’ll never understand how much cooler Super VGA is from CGA. And certainly none of them are familiar with text-based, interactive fiction games. After all, my 6th graders were all born after the entire genre had gone extinct. That’s truly a shame, since one of my all-time favorite Infocom text-based games, A Mind Forever Voyaging, would be a perfect classroom tool.

In AMFV you are a computer simulation of a regular guy in South Dakota. The government has designed you to observe and record the simulated small town where you “live” in order to gauge the effects of proposed social programs and laws. You’ll spend part of the time as a computer program hanging out (ethereally) in an office building, but most of the game takes place in the simulated town. You’ll explore the town block by block, recording the effects of a controversial piece of social and economic legislation on your life, family, and community. It sounds pretty dry, but in practice it’s engrossing and immersive. This must be the only game where you record your conversations with the “man on the street” documentary film style. Hey, you can’t shoot cyberdemons and collect power pellets all the time.

Infocom had really hit their stride here. The town is extremely detailed and interactive, existing more like the carefully laid out and scheduled worlds of Ultima 7 and Morrowind than the choose-your-own-adventure linear puzzles of Zork and Wishbringer. Non-player characters go about the business of their lives, waiting for you to record them in action. And the interface shows polish, too. No searching through your vocabulary to find the exact form of “give” the text parser requires. No random application of items to complete puzzles (i.e. “use the magic marker on the cage to escape”). AMFV is nothing if not professionally crafted. This, coupled with the adult and mostly cerebral theme of the game, makes AMFV seem like it was created for an audience of gaming-aficionados, those players most eager to simply *experience*.

The downside is really the endgame, where you finally emerge from the simulation for good and have to defend yourself from attack in the real world. Remember, please, that you are a computer program. The graphics are also, uh, well… how can I put this without offending fans of the interactive fiction genre of videogames? Let’s just say the font looks nice.

Large-scale community simulations are all the rage now. Whether it’s the Grand Theft Auto series with its deliriously open-ended emergent behavior or Midtown Madness and The Getaway with their true-to-life level design, people love to just tool around a city, taking it all in. If you can navigate your way around Liberty City better than your own home town, you know what I’m talking about. AMFV may be totally scripted, but I see it as a precursor to the other playable cityscapes that followed it. A Mind Forever Voyaging is a benchmark of its genre, and an example of how serious and intellectual a game can be.