Galatea is an interactive video game created by Emily Short in 2000. It follows in the path of many electronic literature pieces, like Afternoon, A Story (1990) and other text parser games like Adventure (1980). The game is loosely based on the ancient Greek myth of Pygmalion, who crafted a sculpture of a woman, and later fell in love with the sculpture, named Galatea. In Short’s 2000 game, Galatea is a sculpture in an exhibition on artificial intelligence. The player is in the room alone with Galatea, who sits on a pedestal under a spotlight, with a placard in front.
The player interacts with Galatea using a series of commands, ranging from tell to turn. The player isn’t offered any sort of explicit goal or map for their ‘progress.’ In fact, the game is fairly non-linear, in that the player directs how the interaction unfolds with their specific inputs. The main way to interact with Galatea is through speaking, either asking Galatea questions to gain more knowledge about her, or to tell Galatea about the character we play as. The game goes so far as to prompt the player after periods of silence ( i.e. after inputting numerous commands that don’t result in conversation with Galatea); the game does this either through Galatea herself, who will prompt the player directly through dialogue, or the game will recommend asking Galatea about specific topics if your talk about commands don’t result in dialogue. These two features give the player some direction within the game; it is quickly understood that dialogue is important to playing, and as the player delves deeper into specific topics with Galatea, they can control the tone of the conversation and their closeness to Galatea herself.
Galatea also features a number of other commands that the player can use, some of which are more useful than others. The recap command allows the player to view all the conversation topics they’ve discussed already with Galatea. By italicizing some of these topics, the game also highlights which topics have been asked about multiple times and thus exhausted. Other possible commands include listen, walk to, look at, touch, turn, and many others. It’s interesting that the game recognises many of these inputs as commands, especially considering many of them have no utility, or are very limited. Walk to, for instance, accomplishes nothing as the player isn’t allowed to leave the room they are in or walk around within the room either. Listen also doesn’t reveal much about the room or Galatea either.
While the inclusion of these commands may appear useless, they accomplish two purposes. Firstly, having the game recognise so many different inputs allows the game to feel more comprehensive and complex; Galatea feels less limited because it’s responsive to a wider range of user inputs than necessary and might be expected. This allows the game to feel bigger than it really is, and it’s easier for the player to become immersed in the world of the game. Finally, and somewhat relatedly, the inclusion of so many commands allows for a more enjoyable player experience. Beyond spelling errors, there’s an encouragement that comes with seeing different responses to different inputs. Even as the player may be disappointed and confused when a command like move doesn’t offer an interesting response, it also encourages further exploration for different commands. Knowing that seemingly random inputs are accepted as commands begs the question “what else can I put in that will be recognised as a valid input, and what will that accomplish?”
Furthermore, one other mechanic that makes the game more user-friendly is the game’s recognition of certain nouns as being interchangeable. For instance, the player could type in “Pygmalion” or “artist,” and both would be accepted by the game to mean the same thing. Asking Galatea about either prompts the same response.
Ultimately, all of these elements, the subtle direction the game gives the player and the ways in which it encourages curiosity and exploration of different inputs and commands, allows the player to discover that there are a number of different possible endings. Whether it’s from deciding to ask twice about Aphrodite, or having some familiarity with the original Pygmalion myth and discovering you can kiss or hug Galatea, the player eventually encounters a built in purpose into the game – experiencing different endings, and possibly trying to achieve a “desirable” ending. The endings are shaped by the player’s various inputs during the course of the game. In this way, as the game prompts the player to converse with Galatea, it’s really pushing the player towards an ending. Without having any explicit mapping options for the player, Galatea gives the player a sense of agency and direction that many other text parsers and works of electronic fiction don’t offer.
Intermittent Mechanism 