Why Stories? Henry Fool and What the Artist is For
Literate Machine
What does it mean to be an artist?
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Doom, Myst, and the War for the Soul of Video Games
Literate Machine
In the 1990s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold almost twice as many copies. Within ten years, the entire industry had remodeled itself around Doom. Special call out to Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian (https://filfre.net) whose work covering early video games I drew on extensively.
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Cerebus: Misogyny and Madness
Literate Machine
For 30 years, Dave Sim engaged in one of the most remarkable ongoing artistic endeavors ever while he gradually lost his mind.
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Pink Floyd's The Wall and the Rise of the Alt-Right
Literate Machine
How the worms ate into my brain, what I did and did not understand about The Wall, and what it tells us about the rise of the Alt-Right.
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Superheroes and the Police
Literate Machine
What do you do when the authorities have been compromised?
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How Can I Save You?
Literate Machine
Let’s go back in time, to before the Pandemic, and see if we can change anything.
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There is No Alternative: Doctor Who, "Kerblam!", and the Specter of Technological Unemployment
Literate Machine
In the 2018 Doctor Who episode “Kerblam!”, something is killing workers off at a far future Amazon analogue. Is it Capitalism? Or is the system not the problem? In this episode, Doctor Who is used as a lens to understand the history of technological unemployment and what it means for our automated future. Bibliography and Further Reading Who Were the Luddites from : Article in the Guardian about Doctor Who’s Issues with ‘Wokeness’: Article on CNBC about McKinsey & Company’s report about automation: Article on Quartz abou technological...
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A Mind Forever Voyaging into Neoliberalism
Literate Machine
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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Vintage Season
Literate Machine
In the premiere episode of Literate Machine, a look at the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction through the lens of one of its finest practitioners, C. L. Moore. Her story (and the story of her husband, Henry Kuttner) in the science fiction mills of the mid-twentieth century is the story of America in the gig economy.
info_outlineIn 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.
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
See in particular his series of posts on A Mind Forever Voyaging, beginning with this article.
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.
See also "A Mind Forever Voyaging - Interview with Steve Meretzky", EUROGAMER.de, 2013
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.
For this piece I played the game again on my Mac using the interperter Gargoyle.