A Mind Forever Voyaging

It is the near and promising future of 2031. You are Perry Simm, an aspiring 20-year old South Dakotan writer who had the loving support of his old mentor and future wife to pursuit his writing career by being employed as a journalist. The job interview goes well, until the employer suddenly asks "What if I told you that you that your whole life is a lie, you're not a human, and are instead a super-intelligent artificial intelligence?"

The veil gets uncovered before your eyes to reveal that yes, you are indeed an intelligent supercomputer that's actually sitting in a science facility, and that your whole 20 years of life were a Matrix-like illusion, meant as an initiative by scientists to test the first empirically-learning AI by simulating your stages of childhood and adulthood. However, once you turned 20, you were awakened for a far greater purpose, which is to enter the simulated reality of the future, based on America's plan for national renewal(which is a parallel to the Reaganomics of the time which the game criticises, and eerilly mirrors Trump's own policies today), and record the everyday mundane tasks of life such as riding a subway, or buying food at a grocery store, to being informed in the state of world affairs through newspapers and mass-media. It starts out innocent enough. But as the simulation unfolds in 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years time, the plan proves to bring horrifying long-term consequences, and it is your duty to inform your scientist creators of the major faults in America's new isolationist politics.

This Infocom adventure makes a great spin in regards to how AI are presented in storylines, where you are essentially some sort of a HAL 9000, except as a good guy. You have a wide-spread system where you can monitor the scientist facilities with cameras and microphones, but in the simulation, you feel every bit as real and human as you've always been, and as a result, the protagonist AI here is filled with a marvelous humanity and compassion. It's such a unique protagonist for a video game, and the descriptions he provides of a decaying world is certainly poetic, although sparse and spotty as is the nature of Infocom adventure games. Fortunately, this Infocom game, despite its great ambitions, is much more easier to navigate than others: The map of the city is very easily referenced and grid-based, dying in the simulation has absolutely no consequences, and it's nearly impossible to get yourself stuck, except for the ending, but even then, knowing the right course of action is easy.

A Mind Forever Voyaging stands among other text adventures with its bold, if slightly naive, political message and a curious, sim-like goal of experiencing the daily life in an ever-worsening dystopia. It's a game that today, especially in the time of Trump's presidency, is very relevant, and arguably also serves as an important predecessor on the possibilities of not only pacifistic and deathless game progressions in adventure games(certainly noted later by LucasArts), but also on the power of game narrative itself, and communicating vivid messages and sociopolitical context through player input. Hopefully some day, A Mind Forever Voyaging gets a graphical retooling in the vein of Infocom's earlier The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and gets reknown as the pioneer it was.