Facade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama
Michael Mateas, Andrew D. Stern · 2003
this paper we discuss our research and development towards creating an architecture, and a story design using this architecture, that integrates a broad and shallow approach to natural language processing, a novel character authoring language and a novel drama manager, in order to build an interactive drama about human relationships. Faade: an experiment in interactive drama In Faade, 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 gettogether at their apartment that quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict dissolution of Grace and Trips 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 oneact play you will have changed the course of Grace and Trips lives motivating you to replay the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out differently the next time. Figure 1. Real-time rendered characters Grace and Trip in Faade, with player-typed text and hand cursor. Faade is an attempt to create a real-time 3D animated experience akin to being on stage with two live actors who are motivated to make a dramatic situation happen. Instead of providing the player with 40 to 60 hours of episodic action and exploration in a huge world, we want to design an experience that provides the player with 20 minutes of emotionally intense, unified, dramatic action. The player's actions should have a significant influence on what events occur, which are left out, and how the drama ends. The experience should be varied enough that it supports replayability; only af...