Watching the news these days, it sometimes feels like I’m watching A Mind Forever Voyaging actually playing out in real time.
Strange times we live in.
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When I finally got to try that game, I found myself being annoyed at how ridiculously partisan it was. Like much of the Seventh Doctor Who’s run, the points made lacked subtlety and were often arbitrary.
In a work of fiction, the only real constraints are what you put onto yourself as the author, and you can present any causal relationship you wish. So you can write a story (or construct a piece of IF) where the ‘wrong’ choice of font results in cannibalizing the elderly and using babies for baseball practice. It doesn’t effectively persuade.
Even if I agreed wholeheartedly with Meretzky’s politics, the game wouldn’t have made me sympathetic with his argument; a point poorly made can be worse than saying nothing at all.
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One of my all time faves for sure
OT:
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The Plan for Renewed National Purpose isn’t even totally partisan by 1985 USA standards. There are elements Reagan would support, elements Mondale would support, as well as both and neither. My best guess is it’s just a list of things Meretzky opposed and maybe thought he was arguing against.
But yeah, AMFV’s not an effective argument.
Yeah, I feel like it’s hard to look around right now, think of AMFV, and feel like Meretzky was too hard on the right wing! I suppose the game might not be, or have been, the most persuasive thing in the world to fence-sitters, but surely it’s better understood as a polemic or a provocation, rather than [shudder] “reasoned debate.”
Edit: I mean, if one of the planks of the Plan had been “fight on cancer’s side in the War on Cancer,” surely the judicious critic would have tut-tutted. Yet here we are.
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On one level, the argument of the game is really that we should judge political decisions by their long-term consequences. While that is not be as self-evident as it may seem at first, it is something that most people can agree on in one form or another.
The problem is that the game then exemplifies this almost exclusively by showing right-wing politics having bad long-term consequences. This makes it less convincing, but on the other hand, a lot more prophetic.
If you disagree for some reason, I suppose you can read it as a warning against decision-making using AI.
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Something unique, AMFV flips the typical premise of “human good, AI bad”. PRISM essentially saves the day.
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