"[...]a thought processor, headware for the computer generation." -- TL

December 20, 2021 5:43 PM

In recent years, GOG.com's famous re-releases of games long ignored by their publishers have petered out, although never quite stopped (largely thanks to rights-buyers like Piko, Ziggurat and Throwback). Recently, they rediscovered a game now owned by a book publisher: Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror, the 1985 party game designed to enable 'digitizing' and playing with/as any person, thing or concept imaginable - including in a collection of choice-based text adventures. (RPS article from years before the re-release)
posted by BiggerJ (8 comments total)

Their version of SimCity 2000 didn’t have the bugs. :(
posted by Melismata at 7:50 PM on December 20, 2021

Works on:
Windows (10, 11)

Takes me right back to the eighties.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 8:04 PM on December 20, 2021

I had this program! Never could figure out how to use it as a tool, but it was interesting to play around with.

It's based on research done by Dr. Leary in 1948, early in his career. The book Changing My Mind, Among Others is a collection of his papers, and the first chapter (Essays In Nuclear Psychology, specifically The Tracking of Human Behavior) is the basis for the circular chart separated into octants that is used as the personality graph which is the data structure underlying Mind Mirrors.

I felt like the software didn't come with enough explanation of the system of Interpersonal Psychology, and as a result it felt like wandering through a maze, one furnished with cool and funny stuff in different rooms for sure, but hard to comprehend as a whole. Reading the article before using the program helped a lot, though!

If you're interested in a summary of his original work, here's a link to Changing My Mind on Archive.org.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 11:35 PM on December 20, 2021 [1 favorite]

That second dedication in the book didn't age too well, did it?
posted by NoMich at 6:36 AM on December 21, 2021 [6 favorites]

The Digital Antiquarian talks about how this led to Leary and the "cabana boys" making the Neuromancer adventure game.
posted by credulous at 7:59 AM on December 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

That second dedication in the book didn't age too well, did it?

In his defense, this was the lie drummed into American schoolkids for several generations. I'd be more surprised to see anyone other than a historian in 1982 calling out Columbus for what a piece of shit he was.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:20 AM on December 21, 2021

I understand why they don't, but I wish GOG still focused on the "good, old" part
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 6:04 PM on December 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

I wish there was a bundle for all the old non-Simcity Sim* games, and one for non-Zork Infocom games. When I look I see a lot of free downloads, but I have no idea which of the sites are reliable and which ones are malware. But still, it was darn useful this week, as I was spending part of my Christmas break going through boxes of old disks, mostly old backups but also some old games. If you are a packrat like me, it makes it so much easier to toss old stuff when your inner cry of "but what if I have a nostalgia kick and want to play it again" is answered with "there, I just spent $2 at GOG and downloaded the offline installer. Which will back up to the local server and also my cloud backup solution."

(I also had the delightful experience of finding, buried deep on one elderly disk, a partial archive of my UVA account from the early and mid 90s. Such a blast from the past looking through it.)
posted by tavella at 1:00 PM on December 22, 2021