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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. |
Motivated
by our belief that a fully-realized interactive drama has
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 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. |
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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 three different things to say to choose from), it
detracts from the sense of agency; the player feels
railroaded into doing what the designer has dictated.
Instead, in Façade, the story progression
changes in response to many small actions performed by
the player throughout the experience.
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Rather than
being about manipulating magical objects,
fighting monsters, and rescuing princesses, Façade
is about the emotional entanglements of human
relationships. Instead of providing the player
with 40 to 60 hours of episodic action and
endless wandering in a huge world, we're
interested in shorter experiences that provide
emotionally intense, tightly unified, dramatic
action. Rather than focusing on the traditional
gamer market, we are interested in interactive
experiences that appeal to the adult,
non-computer geek, movie-and-theater-going
public.
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Contemporary
videogames make use of increasingly sophisticated
graphics and physics simulations. Yet the core gameplay
— navigating, exploring, shooting, jumping,
unlocking — has remained the same for years. At the
annual Game Developers Conference, game developers often
complain about the lack of innovation in the game
industry, the increasing dependence on sequels, and the
design conservatism arising from ever more expensive
production cycles. In this climate, a commercial
experimental game such as Façade could never be
produced.
Façade
thus highlights the need for a robust independent
game development scene that builds fully
produced, radically experimental games, blazing
the trail towards new game genres. If games are
truly to become the cinema of the 21st century,
expressing and commenting on the full range of
human experience, an independent game scene that
builds experimental, art-house games such as Façade
is a necessary complement to the commercial game
world.
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