Retrospective: Galatea (2000)

Please, be noble and corageous regarding your whole attitude.

I’m not going to bother feeding you any more, Juhana’s perfectly right, but I will briefly reply to this:

I do not, and I don’t believe anyone does, believe that. However, if we all bash everyone else’s efforts for not being equal to the great masters, we would soon have no masters left. What I find in Short’s work is quality of writing, and often, a directness and cynicism that I happen to really enjoy. I read what I enjoy. I leave the cathegorization and the nit-picking to the critics, and other people who enjoy destroying art. And while I can’t pretend that any of Short’s works have gripped me the way Moby Dick has, they’ve certainly hooked me from the start, amused me, made me think, consider the weight of my actions (as befits IF). I honestly believe that Short is one of the brightest stars in the (thankfully vaster than you’d think) firmament of IF. I also happen to believe that, say, Stephen King is one of the best authors I’ve read, and comparing him to Poe does nothing to diminish the years of pleasure he gave me.

If you have a problem with a thread you can choose not to read it, or report a specific message if it’s too far over the top. The thread you are quoting from has not actually been locked, which may suggest the futility of a more indirect appeal.

It’s Merk’s board and he makes the rules. What I find disheartening is that there is absolutely no tradition here of locking threads or banning posters, yet you’d never know that from some of the replies. If you want a different style of moderation, feel free to request that in the Feedback forum.

Jacek is obviously posturing but he is also promoting a discussion of one of the seminal works in IF. At least one poster has admitted to a renewed interest in Galatea based on his review. Whether or not his remarks are flattering or offensive to the author, at the very least they are not direct personal attacks on her in an unrelated thread.

QFT.

Please note that “Emily Short” is being apologetic for the technical limitations of the medium, not her artistic contribution to it. It is a trivially conceded fact that all conversational IF is bound to have pathetic conversational databases for the simple reason that an adequate conversational database would never fit inside any available IF format. The problem with Galatea is not that its topics are too few, but that Galatea’s responses to the extant topics are poorly written. The author is trying to preemptively misdirect criticism by pointing it at the medium and away from her authorial responsibility.

Now that you’ve mentioned the meta-apologies, I vaguely remember that the original version of the game did not have quite as many.

If that is the case, then I have failed didactically. I certainly do not recommend that anyone have interactive intercourse with this ugly little scriptoid. I realise that many of the people who play Galatea nowadays do so solely to spite me. But that is a minor issue compared with the issue of anthologising Galatea. It is a dismal experience to see this game mentioned in virtually every must-play list and touted as the flagship of IF. I can think of no worse disservice to newbies than telling them that this clunky old stone brain is the best IF has to offer.

I agree that although Galatea is thoroughly bad IF, it is nevertheless not to be confounded with the riffraff of thoroughly bad IF. Its concept alone is so original, it has singlehandedly given birth to a new IF genre: the conversational game. And yet despite the originality of its concept, I do not think it is possible for a person of culture to play it without a lively irritation of their intelligence. To state that its execution does not live up to its concept is only the first step in a constructive criticism. The next step is to direct our attention at the prose, and not, as the author is implying, at the limitations of the medium. The third step is to identify the primary problem as the aesthetics of the character, not the mechanics of the game. The fourth step is to point at each and every instance of poorly written prose. This would be excruciatingly tedious, so I will leave it to the discerning player. Instead I’d like to address two issues. When I said that “Emily Short” had given birth to a new IF genre, what I should have added is that the child was stillborn. Now, more than a decade after Galatea’s release, there are only three conversationalist games in existence, two authored by the woman in question, the third by a gentleman who goes by the name of James Mitchelhill. I am of course speaking of the infamous Kallisti, an insanely crude and funny caricature of Galatea that made our resident Virginia Woolf wannabe fly off on one of her more amusing and hypocritical tantrums. Is the paucity of this genre due to limitations of the medium, or has the incompetence of Galatea and Best of Three and the crudeness of Kallisti spoiled our appetite for scripted conversation?

The second issue I’d like to raise is of some interest to those IF authors who have literary ambitions. It concerns the directionlessness of Galatea. Galatea’s demeanor, the way she initially refuses to face the PC during conversation, her evasivenes and flippancy, all these things imply a grievance, and direct the player to explore the source of this implied grievance. But other than the fact of inhabiting the imagination of someone like “Emily Short,” Galatea’s has no valid grievance. She has no personality, no past, no agenda. She is not a character forged within the mimetic tradition (which is what the myth implies) but rather a crude manipulable object the player is supposed to push and shove into one the 70 endings. This directionlessness and consequent misdirection of the player is not a problem in a game like The Mulldoon Legacy, where the story and characters are mere vehicles for the puzzles. It is, however, a game-breaking hurdle in a game with literary ambitions, like Galatea.

Had you read the two sentences you quoted with comprehension, you’d have noticed that their very gist is that I am not a bigamist. I appreciate your passion, but I implore you to infuse it with intelligence. Oh, and accidentally, the plural of “wife” is “wives.”