External Links
- Story File (old)
original Art Show entry
Or download Story File (old) and run the game in a Z-Code interpreter. - Play online
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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).
Page Update History
6 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
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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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Electronic Book Review
Each time I access �Galatea,� Emily Short�s fabulous piece of interactive fiction, a supple string of text hails me, flirts with me, and stops just short of calling me by name. Strictly speaking, this mode of address should not be possible, at least not according to the familiar conventions of literary tradition... [W]orks such as Galatea function both as operative images in Wiener�s terms and as receptacles, peculiar intermediaries between form and copy. More than mimetic, more than metaphorical, such works don�t merely simulate responses; through a perspectival process of reciprocal second person, they enact them.
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Rock Paper Shotgun
Letters of Love: Galatea
From this perspective, it�s all about growing up and learning to understand what�s alien. It�s about dropping pretenses, egos and prejudices. It�s about realising the value of others� creations, and never losing sight of your own role relating to them. It�s about learning to accept criticism, even as a critic. It�s about becoming more measured, but also understanding that wearing your heart on your sleeve is okay. It is, in essence, the same journey I�m having to embark on, as I take my first steps into this scary world of writing about videogames.
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Game Details
Current Version: 3
License: Freeware
Development System: Inform
Forgiveness Rating: Merciful
Baf's Guide ID: 1326
| IFIDs: | ZCODE-2-000825-D202 |
| ZCODE-1-000324-90B2 | |
| ZCODE-3-040208-2BC1 |
