A Mind Forever Voyaging into Neoliberalism: Steve Meretzky and the Video Game that Saw It All Coming
In 1984, Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide and one man responded the only way he knew how: by channeling his horror into a video game. My favorite video game. So let's leap through time as the artificial intelligence Perry Sim and see what A Mind Forever Voyaging tells us about our present moment.
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Illustration by Jeremy Nguyen
/ ericrosenfield
https://literatemachine.com
Bibliography and Further Reading
I could not have written this piece without the website The Digital Antiquarian and its many excellent articles about Infocom and Interactive Fiction by Jimmy Maher - https://www.filfre.net/
See in particular his series of posts on A Mind Forever Voyaging, beginning with this article. - https://www.filfre.net/2014/04/a-mind...
This post also draws on Jason Scott’s documentary about text adventure games, Get Lamp, more information about which can be found at the official website. - http://www.getlamp.com
See also “A Mind Forever Voyaging – Interview with Steve Meretzky”, EUROGAMER.de, 2013 - https://www.eurogamer.de/articles/201...
If you’d like to play A Mind Forever Voyaging for yourself, you can play it online, or you can legally download the game file on Github (click on “COMPILED”) which can be played with numerous interpreters that can be found cataloged on the Inform Fiction website.
-- Online: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/a-...
-- Download the game file: https://github.com/historicalsource/amfv
-- IF Game Catalog: https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachi...
For this piece I played the game again on my Mac using the interpreter Gargoyle. - https://github.com/garglk/garglk/rele...