Like, I haven’t finished it but I feel it could make a very atmospheric film with a lot of great cinematography. I don’t know how it ends (please spoiler!) but if any of you think it also could happen (just way WAY in the future) any modifications you think would be necessary could be great.
(I know I probably sound like I want to make a film but it’s actually just a plot for if I ever do want to get in the film industry - or if any of you have any influence in the area. 
)
I don’t particularly care for this game, but its genius consists in having the player discover things piece by piece, from the subtle to the intensely dystopic. A non-interactive adaptation would lose a lot of the impact.
You’re not the first person to think of it: Screenplay Review – A Mind Forever Voyaging (Screenplay link included!)
(That’s from 2014 and the screenplay link itself no longer works, sadly.)
If they put something more into the plot it could work I think but it wouldn’t be the same. Sometimes great stories are not suited for movies unless they change a lot and the fans will be disappointed.
I actually liked the move “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” because my expectations were very low and the creators realized that they had to add something new suited for a movie. Not everything was funny though. The “worst” was actually when the narrator tried to tell “jokes” from the book that were not a part of the plot. However, I did like that Zaphod could only use one head at a time (he has two heads) so they avoided animation which I think is used too much nowadays. Sorry for going off-topic a bit but I think it is a good example of stories/games not directly suited for movies. It will take a lot of changes to make it a good movie, sometimes it becomes unrecognizable.
Derailing this thread even further, I remember watching this on its original broadcast on BBC Tomorrow’s World when I was a very small child, and it blowing my mind!
It’s still on the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine
Oh, good. I somehow thought the Wayback Machine wasn’t good for dropbox links.
I just read the script, and I feel it goes a lot more for the personal life than looking at the computer, which is what I was thinking of going for.
Spoilers if you haven’t played Infocom’s A Mind Forever Voyaging I suppose.
The difficult elements: the game (in a very reductionist sense) consists of the player (who is a computer AI?) observing the same environments over four different time periods to simulate and evaluate the feasibility of socio-political changes a government entity wants to make.
Since the whole “plot” is exploratory, the challenge is finding unique film-able action that will get this story across to an audience who does not have the luxury of making the exploration themselves. Even for an Infocom game, it is remarkably puzzle-less and there’s only one bit of actual drama at the end.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be done; my concern is that it’s basically an immersive set-piece museum game with very little actually going on for movie plot purposes hasn’t kind of already been done in other non-IF narratives with a slightly “do we choose utopia or dystopia” kind of element. And the “computer as person” has been done a lot since this game came out.
It’s basically “The Carousel of Progress” with a bit of The Dead Zone at the very end.
The ending is unfilmable! Just kidding.
Or am I?
No, I really am kidding. I think AMFV is what I might call… narratively delicate? Considering the significance of discovery that Nathan has mentioned and the general lack of action that Hanon has described, it seems that A Mind Forever Voyaging is well-fitted to its medium and would resist transposition to other media.
A Mind Forever Voyaging doesn’t always make literal sense, for one thing. Poking holes in the AI model, which is already a temptation, would be irresistible. Interactivity smooths things out. It’s easier to say Perry (as a self-aware AI) doesn’t love Jill if we don’t have the experience of caring for Jill as Perry, which is the kind of thing interactive fiction does better than film.
At heart, it’s a political critique/fable so there would also be the question of how to update that after almost 40 years.
Like, have you watched Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths - Wikipedia? It’s not got too much action but it really works.