Façade (interactive story)

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Façade

Developer(s)	Procedural Arts
Designer(s)	Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern
Release date(s)	5 July 2005
Genre(s)	Interactive Drama, Interactive Fiction
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	PC,Macintosh
Media	Digital_distribution, CD-ROM
System requirements	Windows XP, 2000 or ME, 1.6GHz or higher, 1.0GB hdd, 256MB memory; OSX 10.3 or higher, 2.5GH G4 or G5, 210MB Disk Space, 512MB memory
Input	Keyboard, Mouse

Façade is an artificial intelligence experiment by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern.

A couple, Grace and Trip (real name is Travis), hosts the player in their apartment for cocktails and proceeds to have a relationship breakdown. Using full typed sentences the player can coach them through their troubles or drive them to be more distant from each other.

Somewhere between a video game and a drama, Façade takes advantage of voice acting and a 3-D environment, as well as natural language processing and other advanced artificial intelligence routines to provide a robust interactive fiction experience.

Façade was released for PC in July 2005, as a free download from the InteractiveStory.net web site. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival; an early, incomplete version was a finalist at the 2004 Independent Games Festival. It has exhibited at several international art shows including ISEA 2004 and Game/Play 2006, and was the subject of a feature article in The Atlantic Monthly in November 2006.

Façade has been the basis for a great number of academic publications and presentations co-authored by Mateas and Stern, as well as contributing to Mateas's PhD dissertation from Carnegie Mellon.

The game is celebrated for its ability to provide a close simulation of human interaction, albeit with flat-shaded 3D graphics and pre-recorded sound clips. The game is noted because the progression of conversation between the two characters Grace and Trip is rarely entirely the same, although it does cover the same major themes of dispassion, art and marriage. The player can take an active role in the conversation, pushing the topic one way or another to provide an interactive stage-play. These stage-plays are saved as scripts which can be saved after the game is finished.

Although the original installation file was extremely large even for broadband users (around 800 megabytes), it was included on several game magazine coverdisks, which helped bring it to the eyes of more gamers and interested parties. In February 2006, a 167-megabyte version 1.1 was released which used better audio compression, as well as a Macintosh version.

The game is currently having patches developed due to running issues.

[edit] Game events

A captured screen from Façade, showing the major characters Trip and Grace.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Most games finish with the player either offending Grace and Trip to the extent that Trip forcibly removes the player from the apartment or the couple manage to semi-reconcile and tell the player they need to be alone. It is however possible to get the couple to rediscover their love for each other or to push one character into leaving the other - sometimes admitting an affair, a fact decided at random upon game-start.

Because much of the game is designed to be 'on-the-fly' reactions to the player or other characters/events and because the game scenario is based on a random compilation of events (such as what topics are bought up, what drinks Trip wants to serve, whether either Grace or Trip have been adulterous, etc.) the game becomes highly replayable.

The parser through which the player communicates to the actors is also mentionable as being able to recognise and accept a high number of complex commands and respond to them adequately. Questions such as 'Do you still love each other?', 'I think both of you are right' or even 'I think you are a talented artist, Grace. However isn't your marriage more important?' can all be fully incorporated into the game engine and the actors can respond in a variety of ways dependent on their mood, random settings and how the player has acted thus far. I.e. in one game an actor may respond favourably to the question 'Do you still love each other?', while in another setting Trip may escort you to the door for insinuating disorder in their marriage.