Quote:Original post by Vanquish
Has anyone seen this game? Façade?

..snip..

I havent played it yet...but Im hopeful.

I made a post on Facade earlier; I've been following this project for years now as the creators were members of the Oz Group, who did some great stuff on believable character interaction in the nineties. Back then I couldn't get a copy, but I've finally managed to get one now. I was going to put up a mini-review in a new thread in a couple of days once I've run through it a couple of times to get a feel of it.

So far I've played through it once, and it seems like quite an interesting project; I love the use of character animation to express emotions, and it seems like there's a fair bit of sway in how the situations develop; however I'll have to play it through a few more times to get a feel of that (which I guess is the main relevance to the discussion here on interactive storytelling). My main gripe is that the real-time text parser interface is hard to get used to, as it's unclear exactly whether Grace and Trip will react the way that a human would to what you say (plus the character limit is too low for complete sentences). I'll put more into a new thread in a few days, unless someone else want to start one.

No one seems to have much more to add at this time, Vanquish. Although I'm glad you've bumped the thread, as I find it terribly bad form to reply to myself.

Since I don't like adding nothing to a thread, I'll post some of my feelings about Facade and its potential for interactive storytelling, as I've played through it a few times.



Facade is a really interesting piece of interactive drama, yet I'm not sure how well this will scale to a fully fledged game. For those of you who don't know the details, it's an interactive drama piece where you the player are invited to drinks by a married couple, Grace and Trip, who are obviously at a crisis point in their relationship. By your actions this determines whether the couple break apart or stay together. Get it from interactivestory.net, it's large however.

The interactive characters of Grace and Trip are quite well done, especially since their dialog is all pre-recorded. I've a feeling that characters in emotional distress might have helped here though, because frequently when I type in a command that is not understood they will misinterpret what I say or just act confused. Like I said, the animation is impressive; simple cartoon style but they express their feelings through body language very well. I think this aspect is something that should be incorporated in games more.

However, I feel that there are certain landmarks in the drama piece that force this to be a linear piece of drama. There's always a point in Facade where either Grace or Trip storms into the kitchen, and they come back cross and forcing you to discuss through their problems. I have the feeling that this couldn't be extended to a dynamic plot very easily.

Quote:Original post by Estok
Re: meaningful designs

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
I believe stories are about escapism, but only to the extent that we can return to reality having learnt something. It's this bit that is really challenging to me. I have no idea how to translate that indefinable soul and meaningful essence of a story to a computer-readable grammar.

This is quantitative semantic composition, where the terrain is the exploration of the message, the distance is gap between the semantic states of the player and the goal, the resource is questions that the game and the player prompts, and the movements (operations) are situations that allow the player to answer, to move on the semantic terrain.

You can imagine that the system is trying to dynamically convince the player.

Yeah, but it's not that simple(!). Y'know the way some stories stick in your head and you work out some of the themes that they contain only much later, after something else triggers a connection? A thematically guided automatic plotter such as you describe above would have to have an explicit goal state whereby "the message has now been successfully delivered". I've yet to be convinced that there's any constant heuristic for a *successful* story.

Thus, I don't think thematics should be in any way automatic itself, but the driving force of the automatic plotting. I would envision an AI plotter that selects/generates plot templates based on both the player's actions, and some representation of an author's themes with corresponding thematic classifications relating to the game world/simulation.

In an MMOG, this sort of thing could be maximally advantageous with an author controlling the thematic focus of the story using some sort of UI. Then each player's auto-story would reflect (say) that week's authored thematic heuristic.

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On Façade:
I was sorta dissappointed that they didn't widen the scope of Façade outside the one room. However, I know the space they wanted to be traversed in the course of a game was emotional instead of physical, so I suppose this was a pretty effective way to do it. I'm sure this tech will be incorporated into a larger-scale game soon. Apparently Andrew Stern is applying it to a military training sim at the moment, to train soldiers to _not_ shoot people. What a concept!

I'd like to see some new discussion here as well, but it seems to have dried up. However, I can add something to this post from Chr1spy that I hadn't seen yet:

Quote:Original post by Chr1spy
Thus, I don't think thematics should be in any way automatic itself, but the driving force of the automatic plotting. I would envision an AI plotter that selects/generates plot templates based on both the player's actions, and some representation of an author's themes with corresponding thematic classifications relating to the game world/simulation.

That's pretty much how I see the first batch of true automatic plotters working. I think it would be best if the author picks a theme and designs the whole structure of the AI around that, similar to what Facade has done. The whole theme was based around the breakdown of a marriage, so the character and plot design could be heavily tailored around that. If other plot themes were to be added it would make the simulation overly complex for this stage of development.

So if someone were to adapt this to a more traditional game environment, I think it would be best to pick a single story template for the first attempt, even if it as simple as the boiler-plate RPG plot of "Kill the Big Bad Demon to Save the World" variety. Most attempts I've seen at interactive storytelling fail because they don't pick a simple enough domain to start with (and this includes my previous attempts).