Chapter four and Galatea

Chapter four is about interactive fiction, a genre of electronic Literature. Rettberg begins by comparing interactive fiction to video games like Zork. He then describes the evolution of text based to the release of graphics cards and how that almost took away the text-based game audience. He then walks through the history of these games and works until reaching the end where he talks about straight up video games. This ending section left me underwhelmed because the games he mentioned were either old and kind of stale, or just unknown games that aren’t very relatable. I got this feeling that modern games aren’t considered e-lit and it made me sad. I feel like the games that I play and grew up playing gave me some of the best fictional stories I’ve encountered in my Life. I felt like the chapter just dances around big triple A games and doesn’t consider them literature.

I looked into Galatea and tried to play it online. I’m pretty sure I played the right thing. It was confusing at first. I didn’t know that only set verbs worked in the game as commands. You have to use phrases like “ask her” or “tell her about” in order to begin to enter anything like a conversation. It seemed like regardless of what I said, the conversation would go where it was going to go. She would just ignore and say something totally different than what I asked. All in all, weird piece.