How well do you know your own personality? Are you shy? Cheerful? Domineering? Have you ever wished to be someone else? Or to have other personality traits? How would you handle a crisis?

Two new programs for the Commodore 64 help you answer and explore these questions. Alter Ego and Mind Mirror let you run away with your innermost thoughts. Alter Ego, from Activision, purports to be the game of life, letting you experience life’s decisions and choices over again or for the first time. Mind Mirror, from Timothy Leary and Electronic Arts, aims to be part game, part tool, and part philosopher as it helps users understand personalities better—both their own and others’. Both programs emphasize the human personality and its reactions to the world around it.

Alter Ego is "a fantasy role-playing game about life" that lets you try those "what ifs" of life. What if your childhood had been different? What if you had that major decision to make over again? The program recreates these and other situations for you as you experience decisions and choices from various stages of life.

The theme of the program lies with human personality in a broad sense. Alter Ego is flexible in this regard—you may choose from your own personality, a random personality created by the program, or a custom personality fashioned by you. [Ed. Note: There are male and female versions of Alter Ego available.) You establish the personality that you will use by answering a series of true/false questions. By answering the questions honestly about yourself, you select your own personality for use. By answering them differently from the way you would answer the questions yourself, you establish a unique personality.

Once your personality is established, Alter Ego asks where in life you want to start. The game divides life up into seven stages, ranging from Birth and Infancy to Old Age. Obviously, the life experiences and choices you are presented with will differ depending on the stage at which you start. These experiences and choices are presented on a map with icons representing several categories, separated generally into two areas: life experiences and life choices. Life experiences include social, intellectual, emotional, familial, physical, and vocational areas. Life choices focus more on major decisions such as college, marriage, major purchases, and relationships.

You start on the life map at the bottom and work your way up by experiencing life or making life decisions. Each experience and choice you make increases your age, experience, and maturity. While many experiences and choices may be skipped along the way, others must be undertaken in order to make choices in subsequent life experiences. This is particularly true in the early life stages because of your personality’s lack of experience and capabilities. At any time, you can check your age and how your personality is doing in 12 different categories, such as confidence and intelligence. Before entering the next stage on the life map, you receive a detailed personality "health" report. You can save games either between or at the end of a life stage.

Results of a life experience or life choice critically hinge on the personality you have employed. As a matter of fact, the most disappointing aspect of the program is that your options on the life map are limited and many times you end up just reading what happens. Most of the time you are only presented with two or three decision options and often only one course of action is characteristic of your personality. The key to getting what you want out of Alter Ego, then, is to take care in choosing the personality profile.

The program comes on three disks. A brief but sufficient manual gets you into the program quickly. The manual goes out of its way to disclaim that the program is anything but a game for your entertainment. While Alter Ego entertains, by permitting you to fantasize— and its textual responses can be very amusing—the program is much more than a game. In fact, I would classify it more of an educational program because of the insights it provides into personality and human actions and reactions.

Is it fun? Well, it’s not a fast-paced arcade game, but rather a program that puts your mind to work and makes you learn a little about life and people. If you enjoy living and learning, you will enjoy Alter Ego.

To a greater extent than Alter Ego, Mind Mirror delves into human personality. This program goes about its exploration, however, in a different manner. Dr. Leary’s program employs pie charts called "mind maps," which gauge your chosen personality according to 16 attributes. The attributes include charisma, arrogance, dominance, submissiveness, and anger. The mind maps look like dartboards, and display your personality’s rating for each attribute. The closer the attribute rating is to the outer edge of the pie chart, the stronger that attribute is manifested in the personality. The attributes are arranged on the chart to correlate with each other, so that the location of the rating for one attribute shows tendencies of other attributes.

In similar fashion to Alter Ego, Mind Mirror gives a lot of flexibility in choosing a personality to use in the program. You can use your own personality, your favorite celebrity’s, or a custom proffle created by you. However, instead of asking true/false questions like Alter Ego, Mind Mirror requires you to rate the subject personality on its attributes.

This is accomplished using questions concerning the attributes and answering the questions by rating the personality on a scale ranging from never to always. An example phrase of such a question would be "nervous at big parties." You would rate your subject according to whether he or she would always, often, sometimes, seldom, or never be nervous at a big party. Once you’ve run through the ratings, the mind maps are available for review to see how the personality’s attributes appear.

From that point, Mind Mirror takes you through exercises that seem to test your ability to figure out how your chosen personality will respond or react to the exercises or situations presented. You can examine a personality’s opinion on various subjects from religion to politics, or you go through life simulations similar in concept to Alter Ego. Again, you use a rating system in response to the program prompts, which are later compared to the personality’s attribute ratings on the mind maps. The objective is to try to respond to the exercises or simulations as your personality would, and, accordingly, have your responses produce a mind map identical to the mind map of the personality profile.

However, the genius of the program is the insight the user gains from setting up the personality profile and going through the exercises—the user is testing his or her own perceptions. First, a subject’s profile is chosen for examination. But that subject’s personality traits are determined by the user. Therefore, the subject’s attributes are not necessarily true attributes, but rather the user’s perception of the personality attributes. Furthermore, the exercise is really a self-test or quiz on the user’s own perceptions, which results in both subtle and astonishing revelations for the user about his or her own personality.

The program adds depth to its enjoyment by offering several levels of play, progressively reducing the amount of prompts and "coaching" you receive. Also, Mind Mirror can be played by groups or teams, making it an interesting party game. Dr. Leary even has made provisions in the program for its use by professionals in their treatment of individuals and groups.

Mind Mirror comes on two disks, with the 2000 available life simulations on both sides of one of the disks. The manual is informative, interesting, and brief. It does not, however, need to be very involved because of the nature of the program and the amount of on-screen prompting and aids. The manual does give you some interesting background into the evolution of human thought, or at least Dr. Leary’s theory of human thought. Also, the manual contains an interview with Dr. Leary on the program, psychology, and life in general.

In summary, both Alter Ego and Mind Mirror are entertaining and insightful. Both are provocative and amusing, and will surprise users with their depth and complexity. They are excellent examples of a serious nonbusiness application for the home computer. To top it off, you just might learn a lot about your own personality.

COMPUTE!’S Gazette March 1987

@COMPUTE!'s Gazette