My experience with Galatea was a mix of frustration and motivation. What frustrated me was my inability to initiate a lengthy conversation with her. At certain moments I could have some conversations, but I could not elaborate with her. This was because I found difficulties in figuring out the sort of verbs that I can use to initiate our conversation. Whenever I insert a verb in most of the cases, the reply was either “that’s not a verb I recognize,” “you can’t form questions into words,” or “you don’t have much to say about that.” I asked her about the artist and she replied that “He had a studio in Cyprus,” she continues, dropping one line of thought and picking up another. “That’s where I was born — he brought the marble for me there and carved me.” At that point I was highly motivated to continue that conversation. I asked her the same question and the reply was, “A pause.” I don’t know where he is,” she says. “Or who, or what, for that matter. He sold me immediately after my waking. While he was carving me, there was no strangeness, but afterward…” I tried to continue the conversation by picking up a word she used to ask a bout, but it barely succeeded. I asked her to tell me about the artist’s studio. The reply was, “You don’t have much to say about that. I don’t know much about the rest of his career, what he did before he carved me,” she continues after a moment. She turns — not her whole body, just her head, so that you can see one ear behind the cascade of hair. “I do know that he had been commissioned to do some reliefs at one point, but that’s about it. Mostly he talked about his travels, his childhood, stories he knew — personal things. So if you’re curious about him as an artist, you’ll have to ask the gallery owners for a biography of some kind.” I was curious to know more about the artist, but I could not get more from her.
Issam, do you see this “failure” as that of the reader/player, the work itself, or the character? I think it’s interesting that you used the personal pronoun for the character — implying that the work did succeed for you in the sense of creating a bit of an illusion that you are engaged in a conversation.
Actually, I can say that this failure is due to the reader or player in my case. I could not know how to deal with it, but that was because of the work’s complexity. it requires certain skills to work with it effectively. I think that more practice would be more fruitful in the sense that each time you try it you get to discover a new tactic to provoke Galetea to converse with you.
Issam, I had the same experience. I wonder why the writer design it this way. I think she could’ve made it more accessible, so why she did not! Is she interested in helping us living the experience rather than knowing about the story and the characters?