Behindthe Facade

(c)opyright 2005 Procedural Arts (Draft August 7, 2005) by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (co-authors listed alphabetically) ** Do not distribute. ** This document is not free, nor is free distribution allowed; you are not permitted to make this document available for download, or email it to others. If you are reading this, you must donate $5 to the authors if you have not already, at http://www.interactivestory.net/goodies. This restriction also applies to academic and classroom use. (Façade itself, on the other hand, has a freeware license and is freely distributable.) Introduction “Behind the Façade” explains how to play the interactive drama Façade, and what’s going on inside the artificial intelligence (AI) of the characters. The first part of this document gives you a general orientation to playing the drama, without giving away too many hints or “spoilers”. The later parts go into greater detail of the drama’s underlying structure, and detailed instructions of what to do to see all the variation in the story. First, we’d like to describe our motivation for beginning five years ago to create Façade, and how, we hope, Façade serves as a prototype of a new genre of interactive entertainment, called interactive drama. Vision and Motivation The dream of interactive drama, perhaps best envisioned by the Star Trek Holodeck, has players interacting with compelling, psychologically complex characters, and through these interactions having a real influence on a dynamically evolving storyline. Brenda Laurel’s book Computers as Theater (1991) was the first to propose and discuss the idea of computer-based interactive drama. Motivated by our belief that a fully-realized interactive drama had not yet been built, we embarked on a five-year effort to integrate believable characters, natural language conversation, and dynamic storyline, into a small but complete, playable, publicly-released experience. Façade is the result of this effort. Videogames excel at giving players high-agency experiences — that is, providing ample opportunities for the player to take action and receive immediate feedback. With Façade we 1 (c)opyright 2005 Procedural Arts wanted to create an interactive drama that provides the level of immediate, moment-by-moment agency found in games, but unlike games, also provides longer-term player influence over the plot itself. In addition to the very local, in-the-moment agency of games, we want the player to experience global agency, that is, real influence on the overall story arc, over which topics get brought up, how the characters feel about the player over time, and how the story ends. Additionally, the story-level choices in Façade shouldn't feel like obvious branch points. We believe that when a player is faced with obvious choice points consisting of a small number of choices (for example, being given a menu of…