Oedipus Text

(Updated Apr 14 to add Trigger Warning)

TW: Suicide

Playing The Game/FAQ

• Oedipus' dialogue is always in Gold, other characters are usually introduced with their colours in the game
• If you are stuck, explore other areas!
• White text is always narrative, coloured text is always in-world dialogue
• If you have any problems, there is an offline copy available in the downloads section

About:

I chose to adapt Oedipus The King (Rex) to a text adventure. This medium offers a great balance of the original, performative form of the piece as well as offering an interactive option to enable a sense of collaborative storytelling that has become so popular. Users have the choice of following the path of the original author, or take very large strides away from that path. It has also allowed for exploration of different locations. Using this, Oedipus took a more active role in the story, travelling to different locations, visiting the Oracle, and exploring his own town to a greater extent.

Where the game takes the most liberty is when the user decides to deviate from the original story. While the events that happen in the game are not historically accurate, a lot of care was taken to base it on historical findings. The creation of Delphi, for instance, was heavily influenced by archeological research. The interaction with the Oracle was an interesting marriage of historical influences and modern text generation. Using the accounts that the Oracle would speak in broken gibberish, translated by accompanying priests, I used a very light form of machine learning to generate nonsense text. Feeding it the entirety of the original play, I set it loose to generate a couple variations. This would allow it to pick up on some of the phrases within the original work to come up with snippets of poignant thought within the sea of randomness. This marriage of historical influences and modern technique is a great microcosm of what I attempted to accomplish with the entire piece.