Tuesday 10 October, 2006

To say that Façade is rough around the edges would be an understatement, but the game's concept is intriguing. Much of the time, games involve simulating something that is, for one reason or another, relatively uncommon in the human experience. The objective of Façade, witnessing and trying to prevent the end of a friend's marriage, may fall into that category, but the idea of open-ended dialog with two other people is not uncommon at all. Why is it then, that when the player is presented with trying to support a dialog between characters that doesn't end in catastrophe, the game proves so difficult. Part of the blame lies in Trip and Grace's ability to respond to any prompting as though the player is speaking in Swahili or is a meek grade-school child. Trip and Grace seem to completely undermine any attempt of the player to actually enter into a conversation. That seems to be the game's biggest flaw. We're trying to manipulate a social encounter away from disaster with our only tools being simple dialog and our hands, and the couple we must interact with are interpreting dialog as though they might have heard one word in each of the player's sentences without any regard to context. If Grace says, "This room just doesn't work," and I respond with "I think it works fine", Grace is likely to respond with some form of "Lets not talk about my work" or "Haven't we discussed that subject already?". And Grace's rant in regards to what she's learned about the player through his or her dialog sounds incredibly static even compared to her half-comprehension of anything else the player says.

In browsing the game's forums, much of the game's appeal is typing ridiculous statements and seeing how the couple responds, or doesn't respond for that matter. One person went on and on about how he was dying from cancer to Grace and Trip, and they didn't even attempt to recognize what the player was saying. They simply continued through their endless bickering about one thing or another even as the player tried to interrupt the conversation over and over again. It's my opinion that in order for a game like this to actually be successful, not to mention fun to play, the pair's ability to interpret and respond needs to be greatly improved. I hate to go on and on about the game's flaws considering how it was written and by whom, but based on my first three run-thrus of the game, the game resembles audience participation in a stage show more than a group of people carrying on a conversation. Time to go back and see if I can make the subject of a conversation me, rather than one of them or anything in the room. I doubt I'll succeed.

Hi,

I was wondering what role you think the willingness of the player to "play along" also affects the experience. Basically, should the game be open enough to allow for the player to do anything he/she would really want to do or is it necesarry for a "minimum concensus" to exist regarding what "acceptable" behavior is?

I agree with you that Facade doesn't always work (your example of the room's decor not working is a good one), but asking the game to respond adequately when the player decides to role-play that he's dying of cancer might be too much to ask?

I was very much willing to "play along" and restrict my dialog directly to the subjects at hand, but I think the sheer frustration of having the characters not respond to what I said, given that the game was more or less touted as having the kind of advanced AI that would allow some sort of normal conversation, drove away the suspension of disbelief very quickly.

At the very least, a character could respond with something like "I don't know what you mean" if I went on a rant about something like having cancer or some other topic that the characters don't recognize.

:-) I agree.

I found it particularly hard to keep up with the characters. I wanted to say more than I was able to type, before they moved on to another topic. That's another interesting thing, you don't really have time to stop and think about what you want to say... very realistic. ;-)