Video games - Galatea

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	Video games - Galatea

Galatea is a piece of art work by Emily Short rendered in the form of interactive fiction, and written in Inform. Winner of the Best of Show Award at the 2000 Interactive Fiction Art Show, it alters the typical interactive fiction game mechanics by concentrating instead on the player's interactions with a single NPC, the eponymous Galatea. Much of the interest of the piece derives from the ambiguous nature of the player-NPC dialogue, with the form of the conversation, and indeed the nature of Galatea herself, which shifts depending on the focus the player places on certain aspects of the character's personality. Numerous endings are possible.

Galatea is widely acknowledged as the best-implemented non-player character in interactive fiction. This distinction is perhaps even more impressive when one considers that the conversation primarily uses a menuless ASK/TELL format.

Plot

Galatea is loosely based around the myth of Pygmalion who carved the sculpture of a woman. He falls in love with the statue, named Galatea or Elise in different versions of the myth, and the goddess Venus brings her to life.

The story begins at the opening of an exhibition. The player, alone, discovers Galatea displayed on a pedestal with a small information placard. She is illuminated by a spotlight and wears an emerald dress. Seeing the player about to turn away, Galatea says, "They told me you were coming."

From this point the story may proceed in a number of ways depending on the player's words and actions.

Multilinear interactive fiction

Short describes this as "multilinear interactive fiction": while interactive fiction in general allows the player to find their own way through the story, this leads in most cases to a single ending (or at least a single desired 'correct' ending). With Galatea, Short presents a story with around 40 different endings and hundreds of possible ways of reaching them.

The plot is thus designed to appear open-ended with the development of the story entirely dependent on what the player decides to talk or ask about or what actions he or she chooses to perform. Thus the original author and the player share in the creation of a work of fiction.

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