Week 5: Interactive Fiction (Sasha Lutz)

 Interactive fiction is a genre of electronic literature that lost its popularity in the late 80s, despite its promising start. People gravitated toward visual games, rather than text-based. You use text commands to progress through the story and communicate with the NPCs. You have to navigate puzzles using limited vocabulary. Rettberg writes, “In many of the richest works of interactive fiction, the puzzles serve to develop and enrich the story, and not the other way around” (Rettberg 207). Some stories involve intricate and creative wordplay, and others are more narrative-based. For people unfamiliar with the genre, it can be difficult to play given the need for specific words. If you input a word that has not been programmed, then you must try again and again. Rettberg talks about a hypertext/interactive fiction piece called Howling Dogs. I perused the piece and was shocked by how entertaining it is. Rettberg describes it as a game where “you need to eat by getting a nutrition bar that varies only slightly in its flavor in successive meals, and you need to drink before each session with your virtual reality device” (216). When you click on these different highlighted words in a particular succession you get different outcomes and branch off into the story. 

One of the works of IF I checked out was Galatea by Emily Short. To say that I was confused is an understatement. I used the “first-time player” cheat sheet and still struggled to understand the story and characters. It seems like there is Galatea, the statue; the artist, her creator; and you, the narrator. At one point, I wrote “attack” and it responded with, “You don't, of course. But the impulse takes you off guard. The mood departs again, of course, and quickly. It was just a stray thought.  It meant nothing... But you haven't had so strong a reaction to any piece of art since you went to the Cancer Society installation. And that was timing. It was only the timing that made that so bad” (Short). Why did the narrator go to a Cancer Society installation, and what does that have to do with Galatea? How does she communicate with the narrator, and who is the artist? It’s a fascinating way to tell a story, but it does take a seasoned interactive fiction fan to be able to play smoothly.