"The best text adventure ever situated in South Dakota!"

_Trinity_ was a more literary and emotional political statement, but _A Mind Forever Voyaging_ was more explicitly left-wing. It bore marks of Orwell's novel 1984 and, in a twist of irony, was probably conceived then. You play as PRISM aka Perry Simm, a computer built to simulate human experience through immense calculation. You'll need to interface with your creator, Dr. Abraham Perelman, who asks you to record data from simulations of the future based on the economic and social plan(called The Plan) vigorously pushed by one Senator Richard Ryder to pull America out of the dumps by boosting business and law and order, fifty years after a similar plan proposed by Ronald Reagan. You can record your actions and views in the simulation, and if you dig up enough dirt, Perelman will commend you. The simulation(entering it requires you to futz with an awkward code wheel in the game package) starts ten years after the game's present(2031) and proceeds to fifty years later as you look around more in the game, and it takes place in the recently burgeoning town of Rockvil, South Dakota. This presents a backdrop for several interesting, if short, stories. City areas change as the years go by. The rough map remains the same, but you will for instance see different cases being tried every ten years, or buildings may appear or get boarded up.

Yet the game feels like a bit of an academic exercise. While Bureaucracy tinkered in using a computer, AMFV forces you to be somewhat of a programmer and deal with the attendant inconveniences. For instance, the humans all have daily schedules, but your computer has sleep mode, which it must use a lot. You can only sleep for about six hours a day, leaving you free to perform tasks not critical to the story. Seeing the nightly baseball scores and news is cute at first, but given the memory limitations of the Apple they could only cram so much research into the authors' vision of 2031. Once you get comfortable moving around, though, it's a short time before you'll find yourself stuck in an enforced lull, typing z.z.z.z at 4 AM after a night's sleep waiting for Perelman to get in; even so, I've found I've forgotten to type ENTER COMMUNICATIONS MODE to leave sleep mode and had to wait even longer for the next time Perelman shows up. There are also annoying but correct semantics as when you must SHOW and not GIVE RECORD TO PERELMAN so that he can review your findings.

Adding to the potentially over-academic tone, when the story talks directly about deregulation of the construction industry, you realize that it frequently makes valid points(in this case, a high rise office building is erected on the former site of a beautiful park) at the expense of losing the usual poetry you've come to expect from an Infocom adventure, especially the one with the most sonorous title. And of course the other hero, Perelman, along with his associates such as Dr. Randu, are academicians who wind up looking better than their corporate-friendly political counterparts. There are probably too many silly goons hiding in the shadows in the game, and their dialog is too snotty. Weaving stories into the dialogs(frequent for an Infocom game) beyond the apocalyptic confrontations would have served the microeconomic view this game takes.

Yet although there is little opportunity for belly laughs, the game does not dry up easily. It may not measure up to the funnier Neuromancer for a harbinger of modern Internet ideas, but the character discovery opposed to raking in money or software or(as in most Infocom games) points forces you to intuit what's right, as you have to in real life when trying to convince someone in an argument--how many examples before they crack? You undergo some psychological profiles, and if you ever fail to show up in the slightly bumbling Perelman's office when he calls you, you are shut down due to an apparent malfunction. In simulation mode, people walking by are the most vivid of any Infocom game, and the subtle changes in descriptions are very wise(i.e. the change in fuel source at a power plant.) The long-term reason is that there are many things to record in each era, and you only need to experience and record a fraction of them before Perelman says you've got enough. You thus have the opportunity to look at specific parts of Rockvil that develop(for instance, your home and relationship with wife and son,) leaving the other half of the game for the next time through. Later there is even the possibility outside forces may shut down you, the computer, just after you begin to think you're invincible(dying in simulation can be beneficial if you record it, as you're kicked back to Perelman's office.)

The implications of Reaganism and what the authors feel it will do to the economy are pretty clear and once again relevant with the rise of George W. Bush. Some of the observations are prophetic, and all of them are legitimate concerns. They are overdone when the game turns into a cross of a gangster movie and Lord of the Flies in the last years of the simulation, which a wonderful finale can't neutralize outright. Still when you think about all the business-friendly tycoon-style games out there it is good to have a serious and detailed game as a departure. It is not as slick as other Infocom games, and its literary value may not be as good as the fine story in the manual that describes PRISM's creation. I also found the message to be confusing when I first tried and heavy-handed on replay once I understood more about political issues--and found myself agreeing with AMFV. This game is also not as cheery as more big-picture action games such as Civilization(i.e. nuclear pollution~coal pollution, both easy to clean up.) Yet given that you will never get stuck on any single puzzle, and the game's impending relevance and the logic with which it reaches conclusions about the Plan and people's perceptions of it, someone who enjoys thinking about social issues and working through puzzles will find AMFV intriguing.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/24/00, Updated 03/16/02