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Galatea
47. Galatea. White Thasos marble. Non-commissioned work by the late Pygmalion of Cyprus. (The artist has since committed suicide.) Originally not an animate. The waking of this piece from its natural state remains unexplained.
This is a Versu reimplementation of Emily Short's award-winning 2000 interactive fiction piece Galatea, widely hailed as a breakthrough in interactive character design.
This is a Versu reimplementation of Emily Short's award-winning 2000 interactive fiction piece Galatea, widely hailed as a breakthrough in interactive character design.
ebook
First published February 15, 2014
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About the author
Emily Short
6 books49 followersEmily Short is the pseudonym of an interactive fiction (IF) writer, perhaps best known for her debut game Galatea and her use of psychologically complex NPCs, or non-player game characters. She is the author of over two dozen works of interactive fiction and collaborated on the IF tools Inform 7 and Versu.
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December 3, 2017
I guess for context I should say that I was thinking about some of the traditional problems of interactive fiction when I read this book. I'm reading like a writer, reading Emily Short, who, for those of you who haven't experienced anything by her, I should say is like the Dr. J of interactive fiction ... sorry, I was saying that I was reading Emily Short because this piece solved one of the problems of interactive fiction, or several problems, or made attempts to solve several problems. One of these problems is the verb problem. That is, when you're playing traditional parser-based interactive fiction, it's not always clear what verb you're supposed to use. Galatea doesn't totally solve this problem, but it puts the PC in such a simple and isolated environment that the verbs and objects the PC might call on are fairly obvious.
That, and you're basically having a conversation--one thing much interactive fiction fails to do is create deep characters. It fails to do this because it's so hard to connect with a character when the game system is so consistently telling you that you're using the wrong verb. You keep being popped out of the experience. However, Galatea has such a clever conceit--you (the PC) are in a museum talking to an animate statue--that you understand this conversation is being had with something nonhuman, and thus the frustration of saying the wrong thing is mediated.
Moreover, the longer you talk with Galatea, the more her personality and backstory and the PC's backstory become available. So it's basically a very effective fiction about forming a meaningful relationship with art. Or something like that.
That, and you're basically having a conversation--one thing much interactive fiction fails to do is create deep characters. It fails to do this because it's so hard to connect with a character when the game system is so consistently telling you that you're using the wrong verb. You keep being popped out of the experience. However, Galatea has such a clever conceit--you (the PC) are in a museum talking to an animate statue--that you understand this conversation is being had with something nonhuman, and thus the frustration of saying the wrong thing is mediated.
Moreover, the longer you talk with Galatea, the more her personality and backstory and the PC's backstory become available. So it's basically a very effective fiction about forming a meaningful relationship with art. Or something like that.
Displaying 1 of 1 review