Galatea by Emily Short Review

Galatea by Emily Short is an interactive piece in which the reader is presented with an image of a woman facing away from them and they ask her a series of questions in order to find out more about her. The game retells the story of a sculptor,Pygmalion, whose statue came to life, but instead of interacting with the artist or playing through the actual myth, this game has the reader interact with the sculpture. The reader is playing a character who is a critic of animate art and Galatea is one of the exhibits of AI technology art, however, as the player examines her you realize she is not an AI.

There are over twenty possible stories you can get depending on the questions you ask and the order you ask them in. Galatea is available for download with the image of Galatea but is also hosted on People's republic of Interactive fiction pr-if.org for readers to play online without the image.

Emily Short, a  pseudonym the author uses, provided a walkthrough on mindspring.com that covered about 23 stories that you can play through. However, she states that she didn't want to provide a walk-through of the game because  Galatea is "a dispenser of stories, customized to the individual who is playing at the moment." Galatea responds to the same questions in different ways depending on the order in which it was asked and in what context, however, sometimes she responds differently for no known reason. In her review of the work  on emshort.wordpress.com Emily Short states that "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 itself takes about ten minutes to finish one story, however, if you do not focus on one story line you could end up playing it for hours without reaching an ending. A transcript of various endings is available at allthingsjacq.com which shows how complicated it is to get a response from Galatea that leads to an ending considering the variations there are in the order a player can ask the questions. While Galatea is limited as she is the only character you interact with, it is still a complex interactive e-lit piece which requires the reader/player to ask her questions until an ending is reached.

Emily Short published Galatea in 2000 and was her first piece of E-lit. Since then she has published over a dozen other e-lit pieces but continues to get feedback on her first piece, Galatea. Some reviews on Galatea are available on ifdb.tads.org.