#infocom

[addicted2coke-theothercoke]

My past six attempts at playing Zork

Got lost

Got lost again, and the map wasn't making sense

Gave up on map, tried new method, ineffective

Refined previous method, introduced objectives, got very confused

Attempt four and five I just tried a lot of things out in a further refined system while fighting the troll. Had a new objective which I did not achieve cause I was spending too much time trying stuff out. Game says I should re-read the manual, I never read it once in the first place so yeah I should

Will update after I work on midterms first

[the-rosebush-mag]

Studies of ZIL, Part 1

by Max Fog

Infocom is well-known in the interactive fiction community for classics such as Zork, Deadline, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as well as more experimental pieces such as Trinity, Plundered Hearts, and A Mind Forever Voyaging. In the 1980s, Infocom became a fundamental part of the history of IF and shaped the IF world as we know it today. The first way they did this was probably the most obvious. The games that Infocom made pushed boundaries in every direction – from classic puzzle games like Zork, to puzzleless atmospheric types like A Mind Forever Voyaging, all the way through to Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) games like Journey (which, while unpopular both at the time and now, was an example of early point-and-click CYOA). The games they released did wonders in introducing over a hundred thousand people to the entire broad and diverse world of interactive fiction, and inspiring people to make their own text games. The second way is more obscure, but just as important. It’s the Z-machine.

Read the full article on The Rosebush.

The Rosebush | Submissions | Mastodon

[golmac]

One of my A Mind Forever Voyaging pieces got mentioned in Critical Distance's "2023 in videogame blogging." Don't see a lot of text game writing out there in mainstream video game discourse. Feels good!

It has a Kierkegaard quote and everything, very classy.

[found-in-retro-game-mags]

The Lost Treasures of Infocom I & II

"Once you've defeated alien armies, solved murders, and overcome curses, real life seems like child's play." (PC Games, Feb. 1993)

[blacjaq1]

[asspull3x]

Kinda funky how "open it, read it" works. First, the automatic listing of things in the room description sets "it" to the mailbox. I enter two commands on one line. The first is parsed as "open mailbox", and the default "open container" handler sets "it" to the leaflet. Then the second command is parsed as "read leaflet", which causes an implicit take.

It makes sense when you think about it, but "open it, read it" on its own... not as much I think.

[2001technomancerr]

‘Zork Nemesis’ Alchemical Correspondences

[damage-cloud]

Enchanter Invisiclues Booklet Cover

[mikailborg]

Forty years later and I still remember being stuck outside the engine room for a week because, like a fool, I trusted the game narration.

[retrocgads]

USA 1990

[evilhorse]

Lane Mastodon in an Infocom ad (circa August 1988)

[kahran042]

Inside Theater

This is a movie theater unlike any you've ever seen! The seats are wide, deep and comfortable. The aisles are spotless. The air is clear of smoke, and the screen is dramatically large. A chill goes up your spine as you realize how alien your universe has become.

[golmac]

Trinity content!

[simplyghosting]

Text-based games are underrated and deserve more love send post

[boredtechnologist]

Infocom's Zork 1 for the PC-9800

Reviewing Infocom's "Zork I: The Great Underground Empire" from a philosophical standpoint invites an exploration that transcends its status as a pioneering text-based adventure game, delving into its narrative structure, gameplay mechanics, and the broader existential, epistemological, and allegorical themes it presents.

1. The Quest for Knowledge and Understanding: "Zork I" places the player in an unknown, labyrinthine underground world filled with puzzles, traps, and hidden treasures. This setting and the game’s emphasis on exploration and problem-solving resonate with the philosophical pursuit of knowledge and understanding. The player’s journey can be seen as a metaphor for the human quest for knowledge, navigating through the complexities and uncertainties of the unknown, much like the philosophical journey through the realms of the unknown in search of wisdom and enlightenment.

2. The Nature of Reality and Perception: As a text-based game, "Zork I" relies on the player's imagination to construct its world. This reliance on descriptive text and the player’s interpretation highlights philosophical questions about the nature of reality and perception. The game challenges players to question the reliability of their perceptions and consider the extent to which reality is subjectively constructed in our minds, aligning with philosophical inquiries from Descartes to Kant regarding the nature of reality as perceived through our senses.

3. The Concept of Choice and Free Will: Throughout the game, players are presented with choices that affect their progress and outcomes. These choices and their consequences echo the philosophical debates on free will and determinism. The game creates a sense of agency, yet within a world governed by predefined rules and narrative boundaries, mirroring the existential dilemma of human freedom within the constraints of the physical and societal laws.

4. The Absurdity of the Quest and Existentialism: "Zork I," with its often whimsical and absurd challenges, can be interpreted through the lens of existential absurdism, as popularized by Albert Camus. The game's sometimes illogical puzzles and unexpected outcomes reflect the absurdity of searching for rational order in an inherently irrational or indifferent universe. The player's persistence in exploring and solving these puzzles, despite the absurdity, mirrors the existentialist ethos of creating meaning through action in a seemingly meaningless world.

5. The Allegory of the Cave and Enlightenment: The underground setting of "Zork I" can be seen as an allegorical reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the shadows on the cave wall represent the illusions or half-truths accepted by those who have not yet seen the light of true knowledge. The player's emergence from the underground to the surface world with treasures in hand can symbolize the journey to enlightenment and the acquisition of true knowledge.

6. Solitude, Isolation, and the Individual Experience: "Zork I" is an inherently solitary experience, with the player isolated in an underground empire devoid of other characters. This solitude can be interpreted philosophically as a reflection on individuality and the solitary nature of personal experiences and existential journeys. It underscores the idea that fundamental understanding and self-discovery are deeply personal and often solitary pursuits.

In conclusion, Infocom's "Zork I: The Great Underground Empire" is more than a landmark text adventure game; it is a rich tapestry for philosophical exploration. Through its gameplay and narrative structure, it engages with themes of the quest for knowledge, the nature of reality and perception, the concepts of choice and free will, the absurdity of existence, allegorical enlightenment, and the solitude of the individual experience, making it a profound medium for reflecting on these enduring philosophical questions.

[everygame]

A Mind Forever Voyaging (PC)

Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 14/8/1985 Completed: 17/11/2022 Completion: Finished it. Trophies / Achievements: n/a [Apologies for interrupting, but before we get to the article I'd like to mention that you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2600, my brand new zine, right now and get more of–and help support–writing like what you're about to read. Unless I've put you off, but this is a good one so I hope not.]

Do you have any famous works that you’ve always been… scared to start? I don’t mean intimidated–I haven’t read say, Infinite Jest not because it’s long, but because [jerk-off motion]–but that something is talked of in such hushed breaths that you’re worried it just won’t live up to whatever you might have imagined?

I have it a lot, and because I generally try to read as little as possible about things before I experience them, it’s not so much that I’m imagining these incredible things, as much as there’s this astonishing possibility space out there that it almost feels… wrong to cut it down to just the one thing. Schrodingers’ video game.

For A Mind Forever Voyaging, all I’ve known until now is its striking cover art, and that it’s Steven Meretzky’s attempt to grapple with Regan’s then-recent re-election by landslide. So it was with some trepidation that I started pouring over the box, feelies and manual.

The manual is worth reading, with the most empathetic piece of writing I’ve experienced by 1985 in video games, as we’re introduced to the game’s central concept: you, the player, are “PRISM” who, raised in a perfect simulation believing themselves to be the real person Perry Simm, discovers that, well, no, they’re actually just an AI.

It gave me enough pause that I actually put the game down and didn’t start it for several more weeks! If anything, the possibility space had got larger.

A Mind Forever Voyaging, now I’ve played it, is kind of a hard one to discuss. On hand, it’s flawed. As deeply flawed as any Infocom I’ve played up to this point has been, and for many of the same reasons. On the other, it’s a genuinely captivating piece of speculative (interactive) fiction that will probably stick with me forever, not least because while it might over-extend itself on specifics, politically and thematically it is one hundred percent correct. 

Let’s get to those specifics. First up, the game really requires you to read the manual. While it’s nothing as complicated as Suspended (which I still can’t believe was only Infocom’s sixth game) there’s a similar sort of “mode switching” as you begin not able to walk about and pick up stuff but can simply switch between locations in communication mode (largely able to just see the same locations, or veg out and watch the news) or read backstory in library mode. It’s really here that you get to what could be considered the game’s most major flaw–how self directed the player has to be for most of the time.

This isn’t the same as something like Planetfall, where the player is primed “you’re stuck on this planet bro” it’s actually literally like “you’re a computer and there’s nothing to do?”

There are big swathes of this game where you’re stuck typing “wait” or even resorting to “wait 120 minutes” which I found almost… shocking. It’s made all the more baffling by the fact that the game has a news network that you can “watch” but when you’re in the mode time passes at a crawl, meaning that you’ll probably burn through basically the entire thing (hundreds of lines of script) just waiting to get to the first simulation!

The meat of the game is in that  simulation, however, and this was a massive surprise to me. The game presents what is pretty much the only direction the player gets–that as PRISM, you’re supposed to do a lot of very mundane things in a simulation of a small town, Rockvil, ten years in the future, like eat in a restaurant and speak to a clergyman–record them, and then deliver the recordings to see if the government’s transparently republic agenda known as “the plan” will work. It’s here the game takes a massive diversion from what I’d expect from a Infocom game at this point, because you enter a genuinely huge recreation of a town that is nigh-unmappable, with hundreds of rooms and most rooms having as many exits as there are compass points.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a meticulous recreation of a town and is an extremely intentionally designed space, but it’s also not a “designed space” as any video game developer would know it now. I quickly gave up any pretense of mapping the space–relying on the one decent map I could find online–and began wandering.

And wander I did. To be honest, you don’t genuinely need a map outside of the one that comes in the manual, as you aren’t really needing to hunt anything out. As has been written elsewhere, in A Mind Forever Voyaging, you are an observer, not an active participant, and as a result, simply wandering as your wont takes you and recording what you find interesting or pertinent is genuinely enough to progress.

Of course, that’s as long as you understand that, because once you’ve managed to “complete” the tutorial-like first simulation, the game literally goes “oh, we don’t have anything for you to do now. Entertain yourself.”

I know that it’s easy to accuse modern players of wanting everything on a silver platter (or at least, with a silver arrow pointing in the direction of the platter) but I really do find it hard to believe that even players in 1985 didn’t find this kind of thing frustrating. Noodle around long enough, and you’ll work out that you can get to a simulation twenty years in the future. But what do to there? Might as well just record the same stuff you did ten years in the future, right?

And it’s here we hit what is–confusingly–A Mind Forever Voyaging’s most glaring flaw but also what might be the thing about it that makes it the most memorable. For the majority of the game all you do is revisit Rockvil and record how it changes across the years. It’s repetitive, and by the fifth time you do it you are almost certainly tired of the same interactions.

But it’s also a perfect experience in seeing the slow decline of society under rule by Republican values. In 1985, this was just a scary warning of how the future could look. In 2022, it’s a sharp shock to the player, showing them how much has been lost and how much more will be lost if we continue the way we have. It is too easy to experience the decline of our civilization as a frog, slowly boiling, and A Mind Forever Voyaging asks you to remember what temperature the water actually is.

As Steven Meretzky noted in 2017, everything came true. The game features a border force who act as judge, jury and executioner; viciously racist policing, and the complete MAGA-fication of politics long before anyone even imagined such a thing. Even the things that seem far fetched in the moment–a supreme court giving the ok to religious fundamentalists seizing government property?–doesn’t seem that absurd when you ask “could the current supreme court have sided with the far-right extremists in the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge?” the answer is yes, obviously yes.

And isn’t it disturbing that you’ve probably already forgotten about it?

It is painful, genuinely painful at points, to be playing a game that shows horrible things happening in a decade to represent a society that is past the point of no return and recognise that these things are already happening around us. That Meretzky was far too kind to expect things to not have gone to totally hell until 2050 at the earliest.

To be honest, a game like A Mind Forever Voyaging is as vital now as it’s ever been, and while I can’t recommend it without caveats, I actually rather like that I’m not completely certain that my instincts on its subtler “flaws” are correct or not. Lack of direction and the need to endlessly wait at points? Yeah, those are bad. But I can’t decide if choosing to create a huge, often samey and empty Rockvil is actually worse than making something more tightly designed. Rockvil might feel more real to me because I had to traipse through several parking empty parking lots; I can’t tell if it’s an acceptable price to pay that so many descriptions are generic (I got tired of things being described as a “totally ordinary [noun]”). Wouldn’t it be more interesting to have puzzles to solve? Like, shouldn’t I have to steal a ration card to make the ration card fraud arrest happen so I can record it? Or would the ludic nature of that undo that sense that Rockvil is real, and I’m genuinely experiencing it?

With modern eyes, I think I would prefer the latter (tighter, have some puzzles) but I don’t actually blame Meretzky for going the other direction at all–especially considering the one puzzle in the game (avoiding being killed in act 3) involves, annoyingly, having to wait (again!) in the right place at the right time to even notice what’s going on (I really don’t know what the hell was going on with Infocom’s playtesters sometimes.) But the only thing I really don’t think works in the game is the saccharine epilogue. The digital antiquarian goes into probably too much detail on it, but he successfully raises that A Mind Forever Voyaging’s setting, movingly portrayed or not, doesn’t make a ton of sense if you go one level down, and ultimately only serves as backdrop for a polemic, which would ring more true I think without the San Junipero wish-fufillment. There’s no guarantees a utopia awaits if we do the right thing now. It requires constant vigilance.

(And I have to agree that casting Perry Simm as mere observer does him a disservice–memory was at a premium even with a new extended Z-Machine interpreter allowing 128k instead of 64k to fit the game into, but that the game’s descriptions are often so dispassionate, and we never see or experience Simm grapple with his new existence as an AI is a disappointment. But A Mind Forever Voyaging is already doing so much, probably too much.)

So after all that, how do I feel now that A Mind Forever Voyaging is the thing that it is, rather than whatever I imagined it could be? Incredible, honestly. I’m richer for having played it, warts and all.

Will I ever play it again? It’s an interesting question. I’m not sure I’d choose to play it again–the slow decline of society is… slow. However, it’s a game I would relish showing to others.

Final Thought: Late summer/early autumn in 1985 was insane. A Mind Forever Voyaging was quickly followed by Super Mario Bros. in September and that was followed by Ultima IV days later. Hard to argue that these three don’t represent in many ways the peak of creativity in video games even now.

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