Cycling around it all with Galatea.

SPOILER ALERT: A few of the many possible endings of this piece are discussed/ depicted.

Galatea, by Emily short is a piece of interactive fiction based upon the classic Greek myth of the same name. Except unlike ending in Galatea and Pygmalion’s marriage, he fears her after her awakening and sends her away. Now she is a traveling exhibit and the interactor is simply a museum visitor, interacting with the exhibit. The prologue is simple, it describes the exhibit and as you are about to turn away she says “They told me you were coming”, though it is unclear what she meant by ‘you’.(Fig 1)


It seems that the player in Galatea is an art critic who is attending and exhibit of works with artificial intelligence. But the nature of Galatea herself is unknown to you, she speaks of being carved, and how she was awakened by the gods but are her memories real or is she simply infused with artificial intelligence? This question on what Galatea is seems to be complicated by the player’s extradiagetic knowledge that they are dealing with a piece of interactive fiction, programmed. But to be playing an IF where you are interacting with an animate statue that may or may not be actually robotic.

Unlike most interactive fiction, the plot of Galatea is advanced primarily through discussion with the character. If you try asking her about herself she will simply refer to the placard below her, but there is a wide variety of possible input, you can ask her about particular words and ideas found in her previous responses, tell her about things, look, listen, touch, kiss, hug, and attack. Interaction with Galatea can be seen in Fig 2. Pausing is also useful in the game since she often has more to say about certain subjects than she initially lets on. The player can also think and think about certain things in order to recap or forward the story line. Though this may seem limited, especially compared to other, more action-based IFs, it is the level of beauty and detail in the prose, the non-linear nature, and the number of possibilities that make this piece worthwhile.


In the help section, it says that the order the player does things is very important because Galatea shifts moods and personalities based on the prior aspects of the conversation. Her personality is brought out through what the player chooses to do and can be any number of things. There are a number of possible endings, some seeming better than others, in many sessions it seems the player will simply walk away from the exhibit, disappointed in how little they have learned or excited about the buffet in the other room. But dependant on the interactor there is a wide variety of possible endings, from kissing Galatea, becoming her confidant, telling her to leave and replacing her on the pedestal (Fig 3), calling upon Kypris or Dionysus or if you push your luck too much, Galatea may break your arm or even kill you.(Fig 4)



Galatea is neither a story or a puzzle, or perhaps one could argue that it is both of them because of it’s interesting character developments and multiple endings. It is mostly a character study and a study in different means of interaction. I found the character of Galatea interesting in that in conversation she is mostly a reflection of her artist, Pygmalion, and that most things you can learn from interacting comes through asking about him. Galatea is an extremely well-programmed non-player character and the possibilities for interacting with her deserves multiple replays. She takes the puzzle and story elements out of interactive fictions and seems to put them back into human interaction.

To download or learn more about Galatea, please visit the author's website: http://emshort.wordpress.com/my-work/

Trying to create an e-poem.

The last few weeks we have been working on creating our own electronic poetry in an attempt to better understand and appreciate the idea of multimedia poetry. We used Microsoft Office Powerpoint to create our piece and then ISpring to turn the presentation into a flash animation.

I have long used power point to create presentations for both schoolwork and my own amusement, so I was relatively aware of the software's possibilities and limitations. When trying to think of what to write my electronic poem about I focused on the idea of movement and interactivity and decided to connect that to the content of my poem and write something about the human body. How the mind and body interact, how bodies interact and the simple profound joy of movement, I titled it "Things our Bodies do."

I would not have written this particular poem if I did not consider electronic elements in my conception of the piece. And although it helped that I had an idea of the program we created the poem on, I was still disappointed with the limited reader-interaction possibilities in power point.


I used the shapes in powerpoint to form the basic structure of a human body, which occasionally moved for emphasis, and at the end completely dismantled as the speaker contemplates leaving. In that slide I used the most and widest variety of animations as from top to bottom the parts of the body left the screen. From the head rolling off all the way to the feet dancing off at the very end (Figure 1). For the most part the animation was kept simple though. The body occasionally moved an arm or moved along with what the text would indicate. Most of my animation was saved for the words though. Like the sentance "Your eyes lingered for a moment too long", "Lingered for a moment too long" dissapeared while "Your eyes" stayed. A new sentence appeared; "Then another moment" and "Your eyes" was still on screen. "Then another moment" faded but "Your eyes" stayed. "Your eyes disappeared for a second and the word "Blink" flashed on screen. Then "Your eyes" reappeared and "Another..." faded in. I liked the idea of playing around with the structure and movement of individual words and phrases for emphasis, something that couldn't be done in a text-only poem.

I also enjoyed that we were working with the dimension of time as well as space, that different words cold be on the same spot on the screen at different points which worked well for contrast and emphasis. One of my slides read (Fig. 2-5 "Mostly grey. Mostly empty space. Mostly water. Desperately trying to find something. Something that's not water. Or grey. Or empty. I realized I could set up my lines so that the words "Empty", "Grey" and "Water" appeared at the same spot, unlike a traditional page poem where those words would have to be found in two different points of the page.









































































The power point software itself was very easy for me to use and ISpring was very simple as well. Since I knew about power point before writing this poem I did not have overblown expectation for the simplicity of the poem my skills limited me to. Although I would have loved to include interactive elements to my poem, I think it worked without them. And in a way I think for my first electronic poem to work poetically it was best I didn't have too many bells and whistles at hand. Images and movement of shapes and text were plenty. I tried to stay away from making the multimedia aspects too numerous and complex because I wanted a sort of simplicity and bareness to the poem and a focus on the text, with the other elements acting as compliments. The software helped introduce me to the process of creating electronic poetry while ensureing that I did not go overboard, though I would have liked the inclusion of hyperlinking to different slides. But overall I found it an interesting and rewarding process, I discovered what goes into creating an electronic poem and I realized especially that like the reader must consider how the text and electronic elements work together, the writer must make sure that the electronic elements actually do work with the text in a way that enhances the readers experience.