A Mind Forever Voyaging

The Good
What is the adventure gaming about? What is the underlying principle that should be present in all the adventure games without any exception? Inventory puzzles, myst-like puzzles, point’n’click interface, branched dialogue trees? No. The answer to these questions is deceptively simple. Exploration and interaction. If you’re given ability to explore the virtual surrounding and interact with it on many levels, than it’s an adventure game. If not, then it’s something else, probably a F22 flight simulator. What I’m trying to say is that adventure game isn’t about puzzles at all. Puzzle in an adventure game is just a necessary evil, designed to make up for the lack of challenge otherwise. That actually became one of the reasons of unfortunate demise of adventure genre in the late nineties. The issue has been addressed many times since. Fahrenheit, Shenmue, Dreamfall, Gabriel Knight 3 all of these games offered their versions of puzzle-less adventure game with a variable success. But the answer has been already given a long time ago, back in 1985. In the form of the game called A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Here’s a little story background for those unfamiliar with the game. In the AMFV you take role of PRISM, a sentient computer capable of exploring virtual reality and reporting back to people maintaining it. It seems that in the world of near future the government has run into some problems with the country. Crime levels elevated, people lose their jobs, all in all the usual kind of stuff. So government officials come up with something called - The Plan. A 20 years development plan that’ll let the country to overcome its difficulties and create a perfect society. Utopia? Maybe, that’s why you’re here. Scientists have recreated a generic American town inside a computer and applied The Plan to its development course. Your task is to investigate what it’s like living in that town in 10 years from now, 20 years and so on. First you’re given list of things to do by the scientists – eat in the restaurant, buy food from the grocery store, take a subway ride etc. Then they leave it on your discretion. You’re alone is deciding what relevant or not, what will be help to the people of tomorrow or what will hurt them. As more of the time periods become available you’ll see that some things are not exactly what they seemed to be. Well that covers it up, now to the review itself.

Text adventures have always been in a way superior to their graphical counterpart. Whereas graphic adventures are always limited by the current technology level, text adventures are only limited by the power of player’s imagination. So creating big and immersive life-like reality is a task that only a text adventure is capable of, at least now in 2007. And AMFV uses that advantage to its fullest capacity. A handful of completely different towns (while staying essentially the same town but in different time periods) with a lot stuff to do, things to notice, events to experience, facts to investigate and without any restriction from developers is simply a joy. That kind of freedom makes you drunk. You can literally do whatever you want. I know that this kind of sentence has been applied too many times to different games, but it can’t be more truthful than in a case of AMFV. Here’s an example. You as a game character have a wife; you can visit her in the town you’re exploring in the first 10 or 20 years. And you will undoubtedly get really attached to her. So when you visit her sometime later it will really break your heart to see what’s happening to her. Damn! It’s so hard to explain without spoilering. What I mean is that you could not visit your wife at all, and still complete the game.  Now that is an adventure, experiencing things in a way you want them to experience in the context of the story and setting created by the developers

And what’s the most brilliant is that everything is so credible and realistic. You’re always in the game; you don’t go “OMG! What a blurry texture? How could they leave it in so otherwise quite a perfect game?” You don’t have to suspend your disbelief, because there is none. The graphic adventures unfortunately are still not capable of that kind of immersion.

The game is bundled (ah… those Infocom bundles) with a wonderful science fiction preface story that is so good, that I wonder why it hasn’t received a Hugo award or something. Be sure to read it before getting into the game. Heck! Read it even if you’re not going to play the game at all. It is a really fascinating read.

The Bad
Well the usual text adventures problems apply here as well. Tiresome interface, awful conversation system, lots of text (that’s unexpected) and so on. There’s actually one of the more common types of puzzle late in the game, but it’s only one and not that hard. Also I wish they would have done mode changing a trifle easier. It certainly eats a lot of time just to enter into a town reality.

The Bottom Line
Otherwise, a perfect a game! If the other video games were more like it, they could’ve achieved that art status they’re desperately seeking a long time ago. Undoubtedly AMFV is one of the best adventures up to date with hardly a single puzzle in it. If you’re going to play only one interactive fiction game in your lifetime, make sure it’s A Mind Forever Voyaging.

The Good
This game doesn't attempt to boggle your mind with puzzles, that's not what the game is about. This game puts you into an interactive world that changes through the ages. The plot is magnificent; you are PRISM, the world's first sentient computer who is instructed to see if the President's Plan For Renewed National Purpose is a worthy cause, to bring the nation out of a state of chaos.

The Bad
I really liked this game, but if I had to complain, it'd be about the lack of mentioning the "record" function in the manual, it confused me a bit.

The Bottom Line
My favourite Infocom game ever, and an infinitely replayable game.

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.