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original Art Show entry
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Galatea

by Emily Short profile

Mythological
2000

Web Site

About the Story

Emily Short's description:

A conversation with a work of art. "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."

Galatea is my first released foray into interactive fiction. It is a single conversation with a single character, which can end any of a number of ways depending on the player's decisions. Despite its age, I continue to get strong reactions to it in my email inbox on a fairly regular basis. Some people love it; some people find it annoying or distressing.

Galatea has what I call a multilinear plot: unlike traditional IF, it has no single path to victory. Instead there are a large number of endings, some more satisfactory than others, of which many could be considered "win" states. It takes only a few minutes of play to arrive at an ending, but considerably longer to find all of them.

The game also takes an ambitious approach to NPC (non-player character) conversation, both in terms of volume (Galatea has many hundreds of things to say) and complexity (she keeps track of the state of conversation and reacts differently according to what has already been said and done).


Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

IF-Review
Dreams, Hubris, and Getting Away with Both
And so perhaps we have a trinity collaborating on this work: the Author, the Reader, and the Subject, Galatea. We affect her by what we choose to write and what we choose to read, but she affects us too, when we see what story we have written and ponder what it can mean.
-- Jonathan Rosebaugh
See the full review

Jay Is Games
No foray into the realm of interactive fiction would be complete without playing this game.
-- JohnB
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PopMatters
Galatea is an exploration and a treatise on what art is. It repurposes the original myth of a creator and his art, which had come to life, and tells the next step in such a process, one in which the created work moves beyond the artist and meets the audience.
-- Eric Swain
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SPAG
A 300K-plus Z-machine file that essentially consists entirely of one character should give any designer pause, if that's the standard for realistic NPC design. It 's unquestionable, though, that this character represents a quantum leap--in intelligence and in vividness of personality--and that the author did it with essentially the tools that every author has. Designers, consider the goalposts moved.
-- Duncan Stevens
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Page Update History

v.22: 23-May-2013 03:26 - Zape (Current Version) - Edit Page - Normal View
Changed download links
v.21: 02-Jan-2023 02:25 - JTN
Changed external review links
v.20: 17-Sep-2022 10:28 - autumnc
Changed external review links
v.19: 17-Aug-2021 18:56 - heasm66
Changed download links
v.18: 17-Aug-2021 18:55 - heasm66
Changed download links
v.17: 18-Apr-2021 04:56 - Zape
Changed download links
v.16: 29-Jun-2020 22:25 - Zape
Changed external review links
v.15: 01-May-2015 05:37 - Emily Short
Changed external review links
v.14: 23-Sep-2013 15:54 - Edward Lacey
Changed external review links
v.13: 08-Aug-2013 12:29 - Emily Short
Changed external review links
  v.12: 23-May-2013 03:26 - Edward Lacey
Changed external review links
v.11: 05-May-2013 08:40 - Edward Lacey
Changed external review links
v.10: 10-Feb-2013 10:03 - Edward Lacey
Changed external review links
v.9: 08-Oct-2011 03:13 - Emily Boegheim
Changed IFIDs
v.8: 28-Oct-2009 14:44 - Emily Short
Changed download links
v.7: 09-May-2009 02:35 - Emily Boegheim
Changed description
v.6: 09-May-2009 02:32 - Emily Boegheim
Changed description, download links
v.5: 25-Oct-2007 19:52 - Eriorg
Changed author
v.4: 21-Oct-2007 01:44 - Michael R. Bacon
Changed description, forgiveness, Web site URL
v.3: 21-Oct-2007 01:41 - Michael R. Bacon
Changed description
v.2: 21-Oct-2007 01:41 - Michael R. Bacon
Changed description
v.1: 16-Oct-2007 01:50 - IFDB
Created page