Galatea

Blog Post #7

Galatea

Emily Short's piece of interactive fiction, Galatea, takes an interesting approach to the medium of storytelling we've been looking at all semester. In this game you play as an art critic observing a museum's artificial intelligence exhibit. Galatea is one of the art pieces you're meant to interact with; it is a sculpture of a woman with the ability to talk to you. The way you play through this game differs from what we are used to. The game consists of solely interacting with Galatea - you don't really interact with other objects or people much and the game unravels through conversing with her. There's no inventory in this game and no intricate puzzles to solve. The whole objective is getting to know Galatea and hear her story. Two commands "think about" and "recap" can be used to keep track of what's been spoken about and progress the story by drawing conclusions about what's been spoken about.

Galatea is loosely inspired by the Greek myth of Pygmalion; a sculptor in ancient Greek mythology who carves this sculpture of a woman. He ends up falling in love with her and the Goddess of Love, Venus, brings her to life for him. The actuality of this in Short's version of Galatea is altered; the sculptor behind Galatea is revealed to be a recluse of some sort. The more you talk to Galatea, it is revealed that she's in love or has a strong amount of affection toward him. She was there through mental breakdowns of his, nightmares he had, and saw the good and bad from him. Yet, he sold her to the museum after Galatea says that "she wasn't what he expected. She was real." 

Emily Short has spoken about the process of writing Galatea. The inspiration came from wanting to develop advanced coding for interactive fiction engines. In my opinion, I think she's succeeded in doing so. She has forged her own path and changed how we look at what traditional interactive fiction games are supposed to look like. There are numerous endings (I think Short mentioned over 70!) and hundreds of ways to reach those endings. 

An interesting fact I discovered about this game was that it was shown in an Interactive Fiction Art Gallery in 2001. The site that hosted that is long gone, but I found an old archive of it on The Way Back Machine which you can look at HERE.