Two Steps Down the Interactive Fiction Road

Wonderfully detailed analysis of two ground-breaking works of interactive fiction. I regularly assign “Photopia” and “Galatea,” but in our media projects course we never have time to analyze the works in this detail. I never did use a walkthrough for “Galatea,” so I am sure I missed lots of it.

Last time I looked at two examples of contemporary interactive fiction that were iterations of the classic text adventure genre. If I can borrow from Scott McCloud’s Six Steps of Art from his book Understanding Comics, those games sought to adjust and play with the craft and structure of their chosen medium. Photopia and Galatea are not iterations, but something entirely new that happen to use the same form. The two games I want to talk about now dig down and look at what the form of interactive text can accomplish and focus instead on the story and form levels of McCloud’s same steps. —PopMatters.