Judges' 2000 Reviews

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The best term I can think of to describe this piece is "word paintings," not in the sense of descriptions that create visual images in the mind of the reader but rather more literally: Art draws pictures out of letters.

Superficially, the pictures are just ASCII graphics * , but there's another layer in the way the letters used to draw the pictures also form words that in most cases refer back to the pictures they draw. There are no puzzles here in the usual sense - user interaction is limited to selecting one of the drawings by pressing a numbered key - but the pictures take a little thinking to interpret, in a way reminiscent of those word games that encode obscure messages in arrangements of letters, such as

       0
     -----
      MBA
      BA
      PhD
      MS
      MD

The piece also seems to have some underlying theme, although I wasn't able to discern it beyond vague generalities. World Wars I and II are referenced pretty directly in one place, a few of the other screens are war references of one kind or another, there's a Pink Floyd reference that could conceivably point very indirectly to war; but it's hard to find the connections in other screens. Perhaps there's a larger meta-puzzle of piecing together an overarching meaning from the smaller puzzles.

This piece is worth a look for the experience of noticing that there's more to it than first meets the eye. How much more is something we are left to ponder.

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*For those who weren't using computers back before today's modern internet age, "ASCII graphics" are pictures drawn out of text characters. In the days of text-only terminals, it wasn't possible to show JPEG's or other graphics on most computers, so some people made drawings out of letters and numbers. This was obviously very low-resolution, and usually monochrome, but it was the only way to show graphics on a lot of systems. ASCII graphics even showed up in interactive fiction once in a while, although it always seemed out-of-character to me.

This piece describes itself as "an interactive seascape," but that's a bit of a ruse; the setting's true purpose is to serve as a medium for telling the player character's story. That's not to say that the setting isn't well-developed - the map is small, but the locations are deeply described, with every description leading to several others at successively greater magnifications.

The detailed setting, though, serves as more than just a picture to look at. Everything we look at is seen through the player character's eyes, and what the player character sees reveals the character's story. We have a sense of discovery as we gradually assemble the character's story from the jigsaw puzzle pieces. It is an effective device; rather than just dumping back-story on us in the introduction or after some important scene, the work reveals the PC's personality, history, and current situation incrementally. This is not an unprecedented device, but it is executed well here, and is especially interesting to see isolated like this, with the story revealed principally through exploration of the setting, rather than through events and actions.

This work does thoroughly constrain the player's actions, forcing us to move along a narrow course; this creates a plot of sorts, since we must see things in a particular order. This aspect makes the work quite linear (in the interactive fiction sense), which is a counterpoint to the non-linearity (in the traditional static fiction sense) of the way the character's story is revealed.

One minor complaint I might make is that the work is less than forthcoming about one unusual verb that must be used several times to get the story's full effect. I'm not even sure how I hit upon it, because it's not one of the "standard" verbs and not one I usually think to try. It has become common for authors to disclose any unusual verbs or other user interface quirks they employ in a brief set of instructions before the introduction or in response to a "help" command, which is part of a larger (and, in my opinion, good) trend away from the once-prevailing attitude that figuring out the user interface is part of the fun; given that this work's focus isn't puzzles, I doubt it would spoil anyone's enjoyment for the game to disclose the verb at the outset. (Nonetheless, I won't actually reveal what the verb is here, except to say that I've used it somewhere in this paragraph.)

This work was entered in the "Portrait/NPC" category of the show, but its only non-player character is a cardboard cut-out - I don't mean to say the player is two-dimensional, or flat, or not well-developed, I mean that the NPC is literally a piece of cardboard.

Which is well in keeping with the rest of this work, where nothing is as it leads you to expect. The game's introductory screen asks for your name, which it promptly throws away and replaces with one of its own choosing. Most of the game must be played in an especially irritating display mode in which all of the blank space on the screen is filled with scrolling garbage text. And the "custard" of the title is the gateway to a psychedelic trip.

I'm not sure it's "art," but it's kind of amusing.

This work presents an amazing counter-example to the opinion I have formed that the traditional "ask/tell" conversation system never creates the illusion of personal involvement in a conversation. Galatea proves that it's possible after all.

This work consists almost solely of conversation with the non-player character of the title. The story that unfolds during the conversation is intriguing, and the world in which the story is set is richly imagined and detailed; the story world has many surprises, so I won't say much about it here except that it reminds me a little of some of Gene Wolfe's extreme-future science fiction.

This is the first time I've seen an "ask/tell" system * produce such a convincing illusion of actual conversation. In ask/tell games, I almost never feel any sense of involvement in conversations; I feel as though I'm a tourist in a country where I don't speak the language, and my ability to communicate is limited to pointing at things. The effect for me is very distancing; I don't feel as though I'm really interacting with the characters at all.

This distancing effect is usually compounded by the statelessness of most ask/tell conversations. The non-player characters are busily going about their business (which might be just sitting there blocking the entrance to the treasure room), and if we ask them a question (or, rather, point at something and shrug), we merely attract their attention long enough to elicit a response; the character immediately returns to its scripted activities. The scripted activities are frequently so incompatible with conversation that one almost has the sense that there are two characters in the room - one going around vacuuming the floor or blocking the door or whatever, and another one who pops into existence long enough to respond to a point-and-shrug, then immediately vanishes again.

Real conversations are full of state and context. If I ask you a question, you might answer it, but you might also then ask me why I wanted to know, or you might ask me how I learned about some part of what I was asking, or what I thought of your response. Ask/tell conversations don't normally have any sort of this give-and-take.

The conversation in Galatea does several things that go a long way toward creating the illusion of real conversation, using only a traditional ask/tell system. I'm impressed to see that it actually can be done.

Perhaps the most obvious thing that this work does to produce a good conversation is also the most difficult: the character simply responds to lots and lots of topics. The limited horizons of the setting probably help some here, but the range of topics is quite large anyway because many elements of the conversation suggest new topics.

This work also uses a simple but effective technique that dispels a lot of my mute-foreigner feelings: when the player types an "ask" or "tell" command, the work doesn't merely show the character's response, but first shows the question that the player character is asking, in the player character's words. While we as the player can't introduce nuances into our questions, since we're limited to the simple "ask" syntax, the player character can and does, by asking actual questions in conversational language. This technique can only work in a game with a well-defined player character, and in fact the player character's questions prove to be an amazingly powerful mechanism for defining his character, and they even help tell the overall story. Some players are sure to object to the idea of having words put in their mouths, but I find the effect to be very involving.

There also seems to be some internal context to the discussion, as though the character is actually paying attention to us and knows she's conversing with us. This conversation does not feel as stateful as a real conversation, but it's certainly not as stateless as a typical ask/tell interaction. I would like to see this area explored more fully, because I can see the beginnings of it in this work, but I think there's even more potential. I certainly don't mean to encourage authors to add more puzzles of the kind where you have to ask the troll about the treasure nine times in a row to make him finally relent - that's not the kind of statefulness I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way natural conversations have a sort of shared agreement on what the topic is at any given time; the topic shifts and changes as the conversation evolves, but each party usually has some idea of where the conversation is and where it's going, and whose turn it is to speak and what sort of thing they're expected to say.

I've mostly talked about the conversation mechanics, but I don't want to leave the impression that Galatea is merely a technical achievement. This is a wonderful piece of interactive fiction with great writing and a fascinating story.

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*The "ask/tell" system is one of the conventional forms of non-player character interaction that we find in many works of interactive fiction. Computers are as yet not able to mimic actual natural language conversation well enough to fool even the most credulous users, so IF authors have had to find other ways to allow players to interact with characters. Ask/tell is one of these approaches. In an ask/tell system, the player converses by using commands of the form "ask character about topic " and "tell character about topic ."

This is a simple but competent still-life piece. The work is centered on an exquisite guitar we find in a forest. We can examine the guitar, including all of the parts one would expect to find on a guitar, and we can play different kinds of music with the guitar.

This work didn't feel very interactive to me, even though we can do the usual things with the guitar - examine it in detail, tune it, play music on it. I think the reason is that the work relies on a "help" command to list the different things to look at and the types of music to play.

I don't mean to suggest that simply removing the help command would help matters. This work with the help command is hugely preferable to the same work without it; removing the help message would transform this into a "guess-the-genre" puzzle, which would be no different than a guess-the-verb puzzle.

I suppose, though, that the game might feel more interactive if the information we need to explore the possible genres and parts of the guitar were given to us within the context of the setting, rather than as an add-on to the user interface. "Help" is clearly a system command - when using it we are acting in the persona of the player, not of the player character.

I can think of a couple of ways of moving the "help" information more into the story context. For the guitar parts, the usual technique of having inspection of the guitar lead to the guitar's main parts, and inspection of a part lead to its sub-parts, seems like it would work. For the music genres, perhaps the forest setting could be divided into more locations, each of which suggests a particular genre to the player character. (I'm not suggesting that the player would have to figure out, as a puzzle, what genre a location suggests, but simply that each location might suggest something to the player character , and that this information would be relayed to the player via the location's description. This might even offer a chance to flesh out the player character, since the associations that the character makes between setting and music might reveal memories or personality traits.)

This is a character simulation, where the characters are a puppy and a kitten. We can interact with the animals by playing with them, feeding them, and petting them. The simulation doesn't go very deep, but there's enough to explore for a little while.

As a game, this simulation would need a little work to remove some odd bits of feedback that make the behavior of the animals a little confusing. For example, once we do something to get the puppy interested in a toy, the puppy "watches you intently," but if you try giving the puppy the toy, he "could care less" about it. Also, we must repeat some actions to get the desired effect, but there's no feedback to tell us that the repetition is intensifying anything, or that anything needs intensifying in the first place. Fortunately, the work has on-line hints, so these rough spots in the puzzle-like parts don't get in the way for long; but it would be better if the hints were unnecessary.

I was little disappointed that the puppy's behavior is essentially identical to the kitten's, the only differences being which objects they're interested in. The two also have no interaction with one another.

This is a small and unusual work involving a "virtual statuette." We can look at the sculpture and its parts, and we can use other senses as well.

The "virtual" aspect seems to be that the statuette changes in subtle ways as we observe it. Why or how it changes is not made clear; the work doesn't even draw attention to the changes, but lets us notice on our own.

This piece has a few interesting tricks, but I really don't know what it all means.

This piece is a fairly standard NPC conversation, where the non-player character is an elderly woman whom we're visiting. I'm not sure what the relationship between the player character and the NPC is meant to be, but we can ask questions about her family and her past.

The conversation is implemented competently, with a good range of topics to ask about. Most of the topics have several different replies that we can elicit by asking repeatedly; there's no direct indication that asking again would give us more information, but we can easily tell that we've reached the last reply when the reply starts repeating.

The elderly woman's life story doesn't hold a lot of surprises, but the character is fairly well drawn and the responses stay consistently in character.