As in other media, computer game trends go in waves. Recently (at the time of writing this), a study claims to have found that interest in strategy games is decreasing. Forty years ago, in the United States, everybody was convinced that the age of arcade style games was a thing of the past. Companies formerly active in that field rushed to move to other fields, targetting older audiences than the kids previously playing with the Atari VCS.
Synapse Software, well established on the Atari 8 bit computer landscape as producer of action games already, jumped the bandwagon and started their own line of text adventures. Wanting to best market leader Infocom, which used the term “interactive fiction” for marketing purposes, they invented the “electronic novel” term. Internally, even more head-on, they called their system BTZ, for Better Than Zork. Which of course always has a bit of a strange ring to it – existence only through comparison? But one way or the other, at least it made it clear where Synapse wanted to go: to the high end of the genre. Setting themselves apart from the masses of treasure hunt text adventures in the spirit of Scott Adams.
And they wanted to go in with a bang. Usually, it was game programmers who simply churned out a minimal plot and setting as backdrop for their puzzle-solving challenges. Synapse, on the other hand, wanted a name author and found Robert Pinsky. In his own words:
Sounds good, although Synapse probably wouldn't have minded a less intellectual name with more mass appeal either. Michael Crichton was, however, already [game=Amazon]otherwise engaged[/game], and Stephen King had sold his licence elsewhere. Pinsky nevertheless proved an excellent choice, his fame only increasing since those times, pulling the myth of this game up with him, but also becoming very actively engaged in the development instead of just lending his name. Which soon proved to be booth and bane:
Pinsky wrote a handful of proposal treatments and finally, it was decided to settle on a surrealist journey through the minds of historical (but differently named) figures such as John Lennon, Adolf Hitler, Marie Curie and… Robert Pinsky himself. With various structural and other nods to Dante's Inferno.
What is interesting to note here, of course, is that Pinsky is not a novelist. Most of his publications are poetry. Longer form narrative is not his key business. Wordcraft is. And it shows in the resulting game in various ways.
Although there is a framing plot, it finally is of little relevance. The opening provides an easy way to technically get accustomed the game for newcomers, but offers almost nothing in terms of relevant story. The accompanying printed documentation gives some background on the game world, but it may as well be played without reading that. And finally, coming to what should be the big finale, it seems Pinsky had little interest in wrapping things up in a neat and tidy way. Instead, he applied an objective he in retrospect phrased like this:
And indeed, on that one, he certainly succeeded. Right from the start, there are strange vortices, ghosts singing songs, mythological creatures, demons and a talking frog as well as everyday objects just floating around as if that were all completely normal. Insects engaging in activities of a clearly sexual nature. With no attempt to string things together in a coherent way. Which is not to say things aren't meaningful per se. Though such meaning is never made explicit. And in many places, it seems clear that Pinsky just wanted to have fun. Making him probably the first troll author in interactive fiction.
Though then again, maybe not, as he exhibited a very good understanding of how the medium itself shaped the nature and the contents of the narrative:
Where the playing experience of Mindwheel suffers is, unfortunately the interaction in the more classic genre sense – also known as puzzles:
What they finally settled for is mostly wordplay riddles. Instead of treasure items, the player finds hidden words to complete poems. Which makes some sense when traversing the mind of the poet, maybe even for the musician, but what about the generalissimo? While the motifs, the imagery adapts with each setting, the challenges… not so much.
This lack of interest with physical interactions otherwise prevalent in the genre somewhat goes along with the technical implementation. The BTZ engine, advertised as a new generation of text parsing, indeed allows for a strong expressiveness of varied inputs. Instead of relying on a rigid grammatical structure as Infocom did, it is much more similar to today's “artificial intelligence” input prompts. Its lexical analysis capable of disregarding parts of the input if another part is recognised in some meaningful way, it sometimes comes to astonishing results. In other cases, however, the results are noticeably less than stellar, falling in the area of a clear misunderstanding of the player's intent.
What's worse, a parser rejecting an input completely (the Infocom way) or misunderstanding it (the Synapse way)? BTZ risks more damage potential. Though in a game like this one, where the detailed correctness of physical interaction with the world is largely unimportant (or at least will not lead to failure), this impact is quite acceptable.
Mindwheel, although garnering a lot of attention at the time and continuing to do so to this day, did not save Synapse. The C64 killed the Atari computer market and the developer with it. It does remain, however, as a shining example of early computer entertainment which draws its value out of the pure interaction with its world, its scenes, its characters. Fleshed out outside the intended “solution path”, i.e. allowing for many actions which players may try on the way, and which are rewarded with custom parser responses. The effort put into this was previously unheard of in these circles.
On the other hand, on that path, it shines much less. Even becoming dull in some moments when one is simply stuck on another one of those riddles which are not all that well logically integrated into the world or the narrative. Some of which even rely on out-of-game knowledge, such as when it seriously expects you to have the full names of an obscure baseball team's players ready in your mind. Compared to that, one has to wonder how anyone can complain about the baseball puzzle in Zork II. Luckily, we have the Internet these days! It's not a game waiting to be solved. Rather, it's meant to be experienced.
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