Continuing the discussion from What would it take to bring back the IF Art Show?:
What really famous pieces have come out of the IF art show? I know about Galatea.
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The Fire Tower gets mentioned a lot as a walking-simulator type IF game. A lot of parser games that are puzzleless and set in nature have been compared to it (like some recent Parsercomp games).
The Cove is a game by Kathleen Fischer, an author from years ago whose work I enjoy but who rarely gets talked about now. She did a lot of conversational or romantic games, with several set in the 1800s. This game is about walking around a beach, I think. Another game she entered was Redemption, which is one of the few games that tries to pull off what Galatea does (an extended one on one conversation).
rendition is more infamous than famous, being a poorly made torture simulator commenting on Iraq and Afghanistan.
I haven’t played or heard of most of the others. I remember a cool one about a fiery guitar.
I think the appeal of the IF art show is that the games don’t have to end up super famous, it’s more of a chill thing, like an indie art museum.
Edit: The Fire Tower shows up 26 times if you search on here (27, now that I posted this):
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Yeah, you are right about that from the author’s point of view. But from a visitor’s point maybe it makes sense to check which are highlights.
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You can see which game won Best in Show on each year’s IF Wiki page! This main page for the Art Show links to all the individual year pages: IF Art Show - IFWiki
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I mean, Galatea is the one that floored me. I don’t even know how to express how touching that game is to me.
Okay, I’ll try: it succeeds as a piece of art in how it centers the idea of the female character as a literal object, the protagonist revealing her aspects from the perspective of their gaze. In other words, you create a perception of her by how you interact with her, as well as who is interacting with the game as the character of the player also emerges.
Its hard to think about Galatea (and Pygmalion) without thinking of this John Berger quote from “Ways Of Seeing”:
One might simplify this by saying : men act and women appear . Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
I read that Emily Short was against mapping out the game and I honestly feel I understand why. There are a multitude of Galateas that can emerge depending on how you play the game, and the tree would be like mapping a human being’s existence in a bunch of multiverses and expecting that to represent a single person.
It’s a great piece of art that makes me think a lot about gender, identity and objectification.
Anyway, I love Galatea.
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