K-A's Week Five: Bring It To The Table

     As someone who has been fairly active in the IF community for a few years now, a lot of this chapter wasn't anything new to me. The phrase "potential narratives" was particularly interesting to me. Unlike the hypertexts we been looking at, there is often more than one ending to interactive fictions. You can click the links in different orders, or have the words generate in different patterns but at the end of the day, you're more or less on the same path. IFs, by nature of being both book and game, have to be more varied in the directions their users can go. It needs to have a clear direction in the story, but also drastically branching paths to make user choice clear and impactful. It doesn't surprise me that this genre would come from a non-academic source. Literature and games are both most commonly used as recreation, and the invention of interactive fiction reflects that.

    I decided to take a look at Emily Short's Galatea for this week. Coming from more modern IF projects, I struggled quite a bit in figuring out the way to interact with the game properly. This game is almost entirely about holding a conversation, but you can't ask very complicated questions. It took me a lot of time to successfully move the dialogue forward each time. Despite this, I was having fun trying to figure out what Galatea wanted from me. In a way, it made piecing things together even more engaging that having free range, since I have a feeling I would have been done in two minutes otherwise.