The First True Interactive Drama
For decades, true interactive fiction--an application in which characters' responses to a player's input are determined algorithmically rather than via prescripted sequences, and in which valid stories emerge regardless of player action--has been a holy grail for AI researchers, digital artists, and game developers alike.
Most attempts to solve the problem have been "top down," that is, attempting to handle all sorts of stories, all sorts of personalities, and all sorts of potential actions. The results have generally been never more than mildly interesting.
Andy Stern and Michael Mateas, however, chose to try to solve a specific problem, rather than the general one. They chose a story with one setting (an apartment), two NPCs (a husband and wife), one basic conflict (their marriage is on the rocks), and a limited time frame (you are a friend of the family, visiting them over the course of an evening). By narrowing the focus this way, they were actually to solve the problem. Not, to be sure, in a way that solves the general problem--but in a way that makes of Façade the first really interesting work of true interative fiction.
That is to say, the characters respond believably almost regardless of what you as the player do; a story emerges over the course of play; outcomes can vary; and yet the result is a coherent narrative whole.
This is not a game in the conventional sense; there are no explicit player objectives, nor any quantifiable goal (which Salen and Zimmerman at least believe a key definer of "the game"). Rather, "interactive drama" is a better description; Façade feels something like a one-act play.
The Developers Say
Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed a five year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective. Façadewas publicly released as a freeware download / cd-rom in July 2005.
You, the player, using your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time.
Reviews
"This is the future of video games."
- The New York Times Arts Section
"Façade takes character to a new depth... trying to push the boundaries of both gaming and AI,"
- Newsweek
"A genre-defining leap forward in artificial intelligence,"
- The Boston Phoenix
"a bold move forward in portraying the emotional lives of digital characters,"
- Edge Magazine (UK), Internet Game of the Month
"Façade is without a doubt, the best actual working interactive storyworld yet created."
- Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling
"Façade is one of the most important games ever created, possibly the most important game of the last ten years."
- Ernest Adams, Gamasutra
"Visionaries in the independent gaming world."
- Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC.ca)
Awards
Grand Jury Prize Winner, 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival
Most Innovative Game, 2005 Independent Games Conference
Most Innovative Game of 2005, Game Tunnel
IGF Finalist, 2004