Facade

Although I had a lot of technical problems with Facade, I am pretty amazed by it. I would say it is the most immersive piece of interactive fiction we've experienced so far, and that is even with my computer running the very slowly or the AI occasionally crashing resulting in no response whatsoever. When it was running well, it almost made me uncomfortable how accurately they recreated the awkwardness of being around a fighting couple. Even when the program ran slowly, it didn't break the immersion too much. I would almost say it enhanced the imitation; sometimes people start to talk at the same time or trail off their sentences or respond awkwardly. At one point Grace kept talking about how terrible the room looked, and I think it was because the program was behind on the conversation, but it could just as easily have been interpreted as Grace having a one-track mind and refusing to drop the issue.  read more »

I know a lot of people expressed some rather negative opinions about Facade because of its inability to understand some user input. Some argue that this shortcoming breaks the immersive quality and leaves users frustrated, making it hard to truly experience the story Facade tries to tell. After reading Marie-Laure Ryan's take on Facade, though, I have to agree with her explanation about how this very shortcoming is explained by the characters and the story itself, perhaps then lending to Facade's immersive quality. As Ryan points out, both Grace and Trip are incredibly self-centered, so if they don't listen to your input, it doesn't exactly break character. It's also evident that the two are quite distracted, so if your user input is answered with something that doesn't make much sense, it can be attributed to the fact that they aren't really listening to you anyway because they have other things on the mind. When they start to argue and the situation escalates, it gets even harder to put a word in. At this point, not getting much of a response goes along with how this situation would play out in the real world.  read more »

My feelings on my Façade experience were mixed, to be honest. I enjoyed the deep narrative and interactions produced (especially the fact that most of what I said was answered in a way that made sense), but it frustrated me when I couldn't end up helping the couple. I'm mostly a listener, and I tried to play mediator between Trip and Grace, but Trip ended up leaving after explaining something about himself that SHOULD have come out BEFORE the marriage. Personally, I thought that getting something like that out in the open would have strengthened the relationship, but apparently not. I was just trying to get at the meat of the problem by asking what each of them wanted, but maybe that wasn't the strategy to go for.
Hopefully somebody had more luck than me, since there's supposed to be other outcomes from acting differently. I just hope me trying to mediate wouldn't end so miserably in real life.

Facade really needs a sequel. Looking at the schedule it looks like we'll be playing it next week and for those of you who haven't played it yet here's a little spoiler: it sucks. (I'll be spoiling things about the game in this blog post so if you haven't played it yet then don't read it) I haven't read chapter 7 where she goes into detail about it yet, but she did say in chapter 5 that it comes closest to the holodeck because the user isn't focused on winning a game (...an AI-based project in interactive drama by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern that truly makes narrative action the center of interest because the user's participation is not motivated by winning a game). The idea that it comes closest is why I say it needs a sequel or better yet, a major update. The reason it needs it is because the game actually could be really good, and the setting of a short conflict between a husband and wife seems like the perfect place to start for interactivity.  read more »