Emotional Rescue

Shaken and stirred: Grace and Trip, the young, bickering couple at the centre of the video game Facade. Courtesy Procedural Arts.

It's barely past eight, the martini glasses haven't been touched, and already Grace and Trip are at each other's throats. Eyes fixated on the painting on the wall, willfully avoiding those of her husband, Grace launches the first assault. "You know, Trip, you do realize that if you hadn't convinced me to go into advertising, I could have painted that painting on the wall instead of buying it?"

"Oh yeah, we've seen how your artist friends live," Trip barks disdainfully from across the room. "As if you could ever survive that kind of lifestyle!"

Grace turns to face him. "I am an artist, Trip. F--- you."

It's the cocktail party from hell, no doubt about that. But despite Grace's country-club parents and Trip's predilection for vintage Chardonnay, these are no upwardly mobile Toronto yuppies. They're fictional characters at the heart of Façade, hailed by the New York Times as "the future of video games." Equal parts soap opera and psychological experiment, Façade may one day be regarded as the program that sparked a new character-driven genre of video games: the interactive drama.

Designed and financed by "artist-programmers" Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas, Façade has been available online for free since its release in July 2005; so far, the game has been downloaded more than 325,000 times. Façade has received a bevy of accolades over the past year, including the Grand Jury prize at influential indie gaming festival Slamdance in January.

The success of Façade has given rise to programs like Inform 7 and the upcoming Storytron, which make it easier for those without computer-science PhDs to craft their own interactive dramas. Thanks to the buzz, Stern and Mateas report that they're on the verge of getting funding for what would be the first commercially financed project in this new genre of video games. (They remain mum about the details.)

Like any serious dramatic work, it's impossible to experience Façade without having some sort of visceral reaction. In the game, you play an old friend of Grace and Trip, invited over one night to the couple's trendy downtown flat for an impromptu celebration. While you can choose your gender and name (the latter from a list of about eighty that Grace and Trip know how to pronounce), your character is otherwise a blank slate.

As the evening progresses, the so-called celebration is inevitably hijacked by the pair's incessant, vitriolic bickering; depending on the direction the plot takes, one of them may bitterly disclose that it's the 10th anniversary of the night you introduced them to each other. As the unfortunate third wheel, you end up mediating Trip and Grace's marital spat by typing out short snippets of dialogue, which appear on screen and can range from empathy-laden questions like "Are you happy together?" to brazen accusations of hypocrisy and infidelity. Since you're experiencing the game from a first-person perspective, you can walk around Trip and Grace's apartment and interact with their possessions. Pointing to their Italian villa painting, for example, might get Trip to wax romantically about their summer vacation, but it might also make Grace mysteriously distant. As in real life, these people don't always say what they're upset about – you often have to drag it out of them.

There are three possible outcomes to the game's 15-minute scenario. Based on your typed dialogue, Trip and Grace may decide to work things out, break up or – because of some blundering faux pas on your part – forcibly evict you from their apartment. Given that you can say whatever comes to mind, there's nothing preventing you from trying to take the game in a completely off-the-wall direction – say, by impersonating a pirate to see how Trip and Grace will react, or by trying to seduce them into a ménage a trois.

The freedom to push boundaries is a key tenet of interactive drama, according to the game's developers. Unlike most video games, Façade doesn't reward traditional goal-oriented behaviour like scoring points or completing missions. If anything, the "goal" of Façade is to let players probe their emotional and psychological responses to the scenario.

Courtesy Procedural Arts.

"[An explicit goal] would never be something we would enforce," says Mateas. "That kind of goes against the concept of interactive drama." Even saving the marriage feels a bit anti-climactic: Grace and Trip have so much built-up resentment and bitterness that you start to wonder if they'd be better off seeing other people.

Stern and Mateas first met at a conference on artificial intelligence in 1997. The pair ended up spending five years creating Façade, mainly through long-distance phone calls and e-mail while Stern was working as a software engineer and game designer in various locations across the U.S. and Mateas was finishing his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon.

When the final product was released in mid-2005, it sent the gaming world into fits of hyperbole. In one of the very first reviews of Façade, online industry magazine Gamasutra christened it "one of the most important games ever created." A review in the Guardian claimed Façade's release was so revolutionary, future generations of gamers would view it as the "‘stand in front of the tanks' moment" – a reference to the iconic photograph taken at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Though much has been written about the technological innovations behind Façade – particularly its sophisticated language-recognition system – if it is remembered in 50 years, it will likely be because it ushered in a generation of games based on emotional intelligence rather than hand-eye coordination.

"[Commercial games] are very rarely about people's inner lives, their emotions, their psychology," says Stern. "We want to tap into a new audience – people who love movies, theatre and books, but are turned off by today's games." Stern and Mateas both mention Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the Edward Albee play about dysfunctional marriage, as one of Façade's primary inspirations.

There are no uppercuts or violent explosions in Façade – though if after the fifth time playing the game, your attempts at diplomacy still result in Grace storming out of the apartment, you might like nothing better than to shatter Trip's Chardonnay bottle over the bar and threaten the two of them with the remains.

According to freelance game designer and Gamasutra writer Ernest Adams, the significance of Façade, and interactive drama in general, goes far beyond the ability to thrill or entertain. Interactive drama, he says, has the possibility to let people engage in – and thus learn from – social behaviour that would otherwise be frowned upon in everyday life. "In the same way that by driving a car simulator you can discover the consequences of taking a turn too fast," says Adams, "by playing interactive drama, you can discover the consequences of real behaviour that may apply to the real world."

Adams's assertion seems to be born out by the internet community. Reviewers and bloggers have noted how they've become more introspective about their own real-world relationships since playing Façade. It's coincidental that one of the first programs that tried to respond intelligently to typed dialogue was ELIZA (1966), a primitive application that parodied self-help and relationship therapy. Since then, many games have expanded on the open-ended ideal. One of the most popular is The Sims, Electronic Arts' simulation of the rigours of day-to-day life. Yet even The Sims has goals – find your characters higher paying jobs, or introduce them to potential soul mates, and more possibilities open up. Don't stock their refrigerator with food, and they die.

In order to fight commercial game companies like Electronic Arts for "control of the shelf space," Stern and Mateas have had to find an alternate way of reaching an audience. Using the peer-to-peer file distributor BitTorrent, Stern and Mateas have allowed players to legally download Façade from their website, free of charge. Given how many people have done so, the pair's business model may turn out to be as revolutionary as the game itself.

"We knew we wouldn't be able to get game-industry funding for something this experimental," says Stern about their largely self-financed project. "Indie developers, if they're going to work on interactive drama, are going to have to go outside the game industry."

Neither Stern nor Mateas harbours any real hope of profiting from Façade. But the past five years have cemented their reputation as visionaries in the independent gaming world. Ultimately, the genre's potential to reach new audiences seems bright.

"I don't really like Trip and Grace, and whatever chemistry they once had has clearly evaporated," writes Adams in his Gamasutra review of Façade, "but I do sense their isolation and frustration, and it makes me want to help them." Generating heartfelt empathy for a pair of materialistic snobs, or for a pair of two-dimensional computer characters – it's hard to tell which is Façade's most impressive accomplishment.

Trevor Pritchard is a freelance writer from Toronto. He has appeared on CBC Radio's Definitely Not the Opera.

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