Galatea is an interactive fiction that presented the context of a ‘narrative’ in a way that fundamentally changed my perspective on the way a narrative works. From the outset of my time with Galatea I had to approach the idea of working with it from a new perspective. I had to not only learn the concepts of the narrative, but I also had to learn how to interact with the narrative. For the first twenty minutes I had to learn the language of the text before I could learn the text. Talking with the statute was, to my demise, like talking to a statue for the first twenty minutes. Only after reviewing the ‘help’ function and learning the basic structure of the language was I able to ‘interact’ with Galatea, but it took me stumbling through the game twice to learn that the game was playing with me. After completing the narrative, I finally explored the cheats page that is described in the help section and realized that the narrative is extremely expansive through the utilization of repeating phrases, responses, and ideas.

Emily Short’s narrative forced me to assess the ways that readers interact with a text to produce their own text through the author’s constructive framework. As I worked through the narrative (after learning of the cheats and subsequent alternative paths of travel), I realized that the narrative was multivalenced through my interaction with it. I got out of it what I put into it.