LGWI - Galatea

Galatea is an interactive fiction "game" created in 2000 by Emily Short. Here is a short description by her of the game, followed by additional input from myself: "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)." The character Galatea is based off of the myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor of Cyprus whose statue came to life. She's a depressing - if not tragic - figure, and conversations with her often delve into unsavory topics. She has a memory and a mood which will fluctuate over the course of your conversation, although imperfections in design show from time to time. There are many more conclusions than I show in this video, but perhaps I have interested some of you to talk with Galatea yourselves. To converse with Galatea, you may use the site I stumbled across a few months ago. You're on your own with tech support; if I can figure it out, so can you. http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=urxrv27t7qtu52lb