discourse

Textual instruments make text playable in a new way. At first, as one encounters their workings, they are toys for exploring language — more flexible than link-node hypertext, more responsive than batch-mode natural language generators. With growing experience, these instruments can also become tools for textual performance. Regime Change begins with a news article from April 2003, following the bombardment that began the U.S. invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush cites "eyewitness" intelligence that Saddam Hussein was assassinated by targeted U.S. bombing and clings to the contention that the Iraqi president was hiding "weapons of mass destruction." Playing Regime Change brings forth texts generated from a document that records a different U.S. attitude toward presidential assassination and eyewitness intelligence — the report of the Warren Commission. This instrument operates using the statistics of n-grams, a technique used for textual games for more than 50 years, beginning in Claude Shannon's 1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication. These n-grams are chains of words, and this instrument uses shared chains between documents as "bridges," allowing movement from the text of one document into a body of text created from another and back. (Source: Author description, ELC 1).

Galatea is a work of interactive fiction set in an art gallery an undetermined amount of time in the future. The player takes on the role of an unnamed art critic examining works of personality referred to in the story as “animates.” Galatea is the name of one such animate however, unlike the other exhibits at the museum (which are forays into rudimentary artificial intelligence,) Galatea was a sculpted women who simply willed herself to life. The player must interact with Galatea through text commands until they get one of several endings.

It's hard to place Galatea in a single genre. With its “animate” art gallery one could place it in Science Fiction. It relates rather easily to Issac Assimov's works about artificial intelligence, sharing a similar atmosphere and similar thoughts on what it means to be human and what it would be like to be a conscious other, Galatea is fairly speculative in this regard. On the other hand one could say the work is more a piece of Magical Realism or Gothic Fiction, since Galatea's creation is miraculous and is the only thing that's really out of place with the world. Also like many Gothic fiction pieces the human psyche is rather thoroughly examined. The name Galatea is actually a reference to Greek mythology, something that this work seems to be rather fond of. In Greek mythology Galatea was a statue that came to life after her creator fell in love with her.

The tech at work beneath the text is fairly complex. It's not simply a dialogue tree with set responses and limited choices. The game tracks tension, sympathy, mood, and general conversation flow to give players a level of interactivity in conversation that is rarely seen in any examples of modern games. On top of this there are over 400 responses to words and 25+ unique endings. Its method of interaction is very similar to old text adventure games like Zork and its ilk, the player enters commands followed by key terms and the results are narrated.

Overall the work is objectively well written. Its lore of “animates” lends itself rather interestingly to the player. One may look at the work as an example of what interaction with an “animate” from the story's world might be like. Galatea the character being very similar to the “animates’” description from the story. The many varied endings and possible responses lends itself to a very individualized experience. No two readings would be exactly alike and each repeated reading builds upon the world’s lore and the characters of Galatea, the narrator, and Galatea's creator become more fleshed out and grounded. It uses multiple references to Greek mythology which helps give the work an atmosphere of mystery and a kind of oldness to its sci-fi themes.