oh tell me more about your Italy trip, Trip

Sep 16, 2013 by bganter

so, in the hour I had to play around with Facade, I tried out three strategies:

1. Touch and provoke my hosts as frequently as possible. Because when do I get to act on these sociopathic urges in real life?
   
2. Honestly try to invest serious effort with a tragically mismatched couple. As other players may have pointed out, trying to steer conversation into a new direction is usually met with the kind of “uhhs” and “hehes” that dissolve so many real life conversations(that much had a certain pang of truth to it..).  A common criticism seems to point out the lack of meaningful dialogue possible between the player and the hosts, but I guess a sneaky justification for the flat AI is this: Grace and Trip are simply not all that interested in what you have to say. You’re boring. Good intentioned or not, both want to manipulate you into validating their view, and any material you throw out of your keyboard mouth that doesn’t support one or the other in a direct way will be smoothly ignored so they can keep the spotlight and spend more time protecting their reputations. And hey, that’s cool too. So as in life, I passively sat back and watched these two pathetics “talk it out”. I’ll point out that although my sympathy for these computer people was low (Trip definitely hits his wife), Grace brought enough civility into the interactions to make me at least want to stick around to see how this playthrough ends (i.e. me getting ejected from apartment, again).
3. Taking a less ambitious approach. This third time I decided to experiment by opening my trap as infrequently as possible, and only to coax out more dialogue layers from my hosts. Although using simple command phrases like “DRINK” and “WHY?” made me feel more primate than engaging house guest, it at least got Trace (that’s their special couples name) talking a bit more with the addition of attempted neutrality on my part.

I was Facade-ing at a friend’s place because I couldn’t install it properly on my own computer, so unfortunately I could only play so long before his girlfriend came over and I was asked to leave.