Galatea - amazing interactive fiction

[miriam_e]

My favorite work of Interactive Fiction (IF) is "Galatea" by the incredibly talented author Emily Short.

So, what is IF? You have probably heard of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, where you are able to make choices at various points in a story and it branches depending on what you decide. They are often called "text adventures".

IF lets you type in what you want to do and the program updates your situation. Most use pure text; some use pictures and text; some use animated images. (I always wanted to write stories that play out interactively inside virtual worlds -- I call it VRFiction. There have been some brilliant such works, such as "The Last of Us" and "The Last of Us Part 2"). But in spite of all the potential for graphics, plain old text IF is still often the most complex.

Galatea has around 30 verbs, but more than 150 nouns. You can type in "help" (without the quote marks) to get hints, such as some words the program will respond to.

Most IF has some kind of quest, or story, or puzzle that you are supposed to solve, but Galatea is unusual in that it is a character study which can go hundreds of different ways, depending on what you do or say.

Expect to be frustrated at first, but it can become quite addictive to play over and over again, making different choices and getting different outcomes.

You can download Galatea as a file to be run on your computer, or you can play it online:
http://pr-if.org/play/galatea/

If you want the downloadable file so you can play it offline, you can get it at:
http://ifwiki.org/index.php/Galatea
or
https://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/art/if-artshow/year2000/
You will need a reader program. I recommend Gargoyle, which can read many Interactive Fiction formats.

Comments

[greylock]

I'd heard people were still making text adventures (as I think of them), but this is the first time I have seen one referenced in the wild.

As a kid I loved them. All the graphics were in your head. My stepfather programmed one I played (I suspect it came from some magazine) called Caverns of Chaos(?) on the VZ200 and I loved it. I still remember it well, better than some other games I've played (but, that's the nature of memory too).

There's a docco about IF called "Get Lamp" if you've not seen it:
\https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp

[miriam_e]

Oh, yes! The interactive fiction (IF) scene is very much still alive. It continues to thrive. Just as movies never killed off books, video games never killed off text adventures. There are contests every year with heaps of entries and prize money. Emily Short is still very involved in the scene. Her latest blog entry gives a list of the many of things that are happening and upcoming. https://emshort.blog/

Some especially notable are:

The annual Interactive Fiction Competition
https://ifcomp.org/

The Xyzzy Awards
http://xyzzyawards.org/

Inkjam (where authors get to vote on fellow authors' works)
https://itch.io/jam/inkjam-2020

In just a couple of days, 28th September, the final date for entries to this year's IFComp close.

You hit on one of the key advantages IF has over the most gloriously realistic video game: all the graphics play out in the best virtual reality generator of all -- your mind. Another great advantage is that they are tiny compared to the average video game. They can also be far more complex and nuanced. Galatea is a great example of that. For example if you ask her about her creator, Pygmalion, then she will start to reminisce about those times long past. That kind of thing is difficult to do in a video game without confusing the hell out of the player, but is easy and perfectly natural in a text adventure. Likewise you can give detailed descriptions of a person's state of mind in text, whereas displaying those things in a video game is extremely difficult without resorting to voiceover.

Thanks for alerting me to "Get Lamp". I haven't seen it, though I remember the announcements when they started filming, but then forgot all about it. I wonder if I can still buy it. The order page doesn't say how much it is, so I'll wait a couple of days for when I have more money, then order it. Yay! (Though with Trump slowing the mail in USA and COVID slowing the mail everywhere else, I'm likely to receive it by about Xmas.)

[miriam_e]

I should also have mentioned some of the enormous repositories of interactive fiction:

The Interactive Fiction Archive
http://www.ifarchive.org/

The Interactive Fiction Database - IF and Text Adventures
http://ifdb.tads.org/

The People's Republic of Interactive Fiction - Play
http://pr-if.org/play/

Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive (a great resource, but died in 2013)
http://wurb.com/if/
Luckily the Internet Archive has kept a copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130112231747/http://wurb.com/if/index


And I completely forgot about the lower profile Spring Thing competition:
https://www.springthing.net/2020/
I have a funny feeling it may be based in Australia... though I could be wrong about that.

Caverns of Chaos

[miriam_e]

On a whim I looked online for "Caverns of Chaos". You can download it for free from several places on the net:

https://archive.org/details/CavernsOfChaosV.16SW1992PaulMartinezAliCastroAdventureInteractiveFiction

https://dosgames.com/game/caverns-of-chaos/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/28539/caverns-of-chaos/

https://www.mobygames.com/game/28539/caverns-of-chaos/

You will need to run it on MSWindows under DOS, possibly with something called DOSBox -- an emulator to simulate the old DOS environment (also available for the Mac).

http://www.xtcabandonware.com/game/1541/dosbox-074
https://www.xtcabandonware.com/dosbox/

Happy reminiscing. :)

Re: Caverns of Chaos

[greylock]

I don't think this was it, based on the screen shots.
But thanks.
I don't think I have it in me to play any games now, text or otherwise.