When Robert Pinsky Wrote a Video Game

Given the thoroughly niche status they now occupy, it is hard to recall that text adventures were once at the forefront of video gaming—let alone that they were heralded by an optimistic few as the dawn of a new literature. But for a brief time in the mid-nineteen-eighties major literary publishers, including Simon & Schuster and Random House, opened software divisions, and major bookstores stocked works of “interactive fiction.” Popular writers, including Douglas Adams and Thomas M. Disch, turned their capable hands to the burgeoning form. It was in the midst of this excited moment that the future three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky wrote a video game called “Mindwheel,” which, as Pinsky told me recently, over email, he is still proud of. “I look on it as part of my life’s work in writing,” he said.