A story about Jenn and how a video game made her politically aware.

It's 1992, and I finally get a computer that can actually DO stuff. A 486 running Windows 3.1. My first realy game for that? "The Lost Treasures of Infocom" 1 and 2.

I'd always loved Zork games, and having the entire (almost) archive of Infocom text based "interactive fiction" games really appealed to me. One of the games in that package was "A Mind Forever Voyaging" by Steve Meretzky. It's a game that left a deep impact in how it predicts the future.

The game involves Perry Simm, who has recently been told he is a computer simulation of a human raised "in world" since birth, asked to run simulations of a governmental "Plan for Renewed National Purpose." The plan being a (what was then) exaggerated form of the Reagan Administration's policies, something that wasn't on 18 year old Jenn's brain at the time.

The simulation involved the world 20, 30, 40 and 50 years after being enacted. Basically, the plan was pretty much lowering taxes, deregulation, privatization of services and a return to "traditional values." There's actually not a lot to the game. The bulk of it being exploring the simualtion as time goes on. But as time goes on, you see that things, while better at first, go quite off the deep end as time goes on.

I'm going off memory of a game I played thirty plus years ago, but....

At the 20 year mark, everything is actually going very well. Everyone is doing better, technology is moving along, everyone seems prosperous. The rich are getting richer, but so are the folks who aren't rich. There's one thing, though. The fundamentalist "Church of God's Will" has started getting involved with politics. At first just influencing policy, but eventually leading to overturning the seperation of Church and State.

As the years go on, a local Chinese restaurant you go to is cleaning racist grafitti off it's storefront. The Preident now has far more power than the other branches of government and is in power for longer. The Schools are now all private, and mostly run by the Church of God's Will. Eventually the most of the civil services in the city become pay services or eventually privatizes.

Later on, the church runs the police, rationing is everywhere. Your family, who had moved into an apartment at the beginning of the game hoping for a better life, are living there decades later barely able to aford rent. The rich live mainly isolated in a large apartment building downtown, where you can't get into (And infact being pushed away when trying to enter becomes more and mroe violent as the years move on). The Zoo becomes private. Eventually it's shut down with a terrible smell coming from it, implying it was just straight up abandonned.

This game was written in 1985.

While it does go off the deep end (gladiator fights in the stadium near the end, monkey torture time at the zoo, and your born-again son sending your wife to a gulag because she spoke against religion), the mechanics of the game...living in this world....making relationships with the people around you and the places...and seeing how it's going downhill...it left a mark in me.

It wasn't until about 2000 I started noticing...we're living the game now. The plan is enacted through the various Reagan era policies, and while they were slowed down during the Clinton Administration, the second Bush one accellerated it again.

And I didn't want that world I saw in A Mind Forever Voyaging for anyone. Sadly, I've watched as it continued it's march forward. What took 20 years in the game has taken about forty in the real world. We prospered for a while, but it's now taking a down turn as the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

I'm only sad it took me another twenty years to get involved. And sadder than it took someone else dragging me out of a self-imposed isolation to do it.

You can play A Mind Forever Voyaging online, but without the game materials it may not make the best sense. But if you can play it, and you can get into it without all the documentation (Which, as most infocom games did, were made as items that existed IN THAT WORLD), it's eye opening and will show you where we're headed.

And it ain't good.