Thoughts on Facade

Sep 16, 2013 by bganter

Facade is an interesting concept with a rather uncomfortable storyline. No matter how many times I tried to reason with Grace and Trip, it always resulted in me being removed from the apartment. Having to experience the awkwardness over and over again throughout the multiple playthroughs was not something I enjoyed. The concept of an interactive story with a natural language processor was a bold undertaking.

One thing that Facade did well was that it allowed for the player or the audience, to act and behave as different personas. You make make attempts at being the good guy and try to resolve things between Grace and Trip, or you can take the character of an [expletive removed] and say things to exacerbate the situation. Heck, you can even be a total nut job and use the hug command over and over again while ignoring the dialogue of the story; then you might even make it a game to see how fast it takes to get kicked out of the apartment 😛

However, the natural language processor and limited amount of scripted dialogue prevented Facade from becoming and truly immersive game, it was not able to handle anymore than simple statements or phrases. If Facade was to have an AI that is able to respond to more complex sentences and to understand the meaning behind it, the game could then involve and and truly immerse the player or the audience. By providing a richer environment it allows for more emotional investment. Since this not the case, every time you say something that Grace and Trip cannot compute, they respond with a “Uhhhh… Yeah..,” as if you’ve just muttered something completely incoherent.

All in all, I appreciate Facade as a good attempt to provide an immersive experience and the clunkiness of the language processing added to the inherent awkwardness of the story.