Façade is Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern’s real life simulator where you’re thrown into the middle of an argument between two of your friends. If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a relationship counsellor, here’s your chance to find out how many marriages you’d save.
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Façade was created over a period of five years by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, the former an AI engineer and the latter an Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They were focused on researching and developing artificially intelligent entertainment and their title was an almost entirely self-funded, industry-academia collaboration. Façade won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival during the year after its release, and it has seen been mentioned in many articles as one of the best representations of social intercourse in a video game.
If we’re totally honest, none of the 1001-Up.com team had heard of the title prior to completing research for a piece on Kent Hudson’s The Novelist. We dug a little deeper and, after realising that Façade was actually in our 1001 list and could be easily downloaded from the Interactive Story website, we spent a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon messing around with Mateas and Stern’s masterpiece. Of course, this soon deteriorated into the boys trying to chat up the female protagonist – but what do you expect when you give them a game with a text parser?
Façade centres on the relationship between an attractive and materially-successful couple in their early thirties called Grace and Trip. The player is their long-time friend and you’ve been invited over to their new home for cocktails; but the evening quickly worsens and you find yourself entangled in the high-conflict breakdown of their marriage. The accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are made, and by the end of the intense one-act play the course of their life together has been permanently changed.
Players select the name of their male or female character when the game begins and are addressed by this title throughout. The arrow keys are used to move around the apartment and certain items can be interacted with via the cursor; for example, you can drink the beverage that Trip mixes for you, shake the Magic 8-Ball on the bar, or comfort Grace when she’s upset. The title makes use of a text parser through which players communicate with the couple and it’s notable for its ability to recognise a large number of complex commands. They respond in a variety of ways dependent on their mood, random fluctuations and your past actions; in one scenario Grace may respond favourably when you praise her on her decorating but in another context she may think you’re patronising her.
Although it’s good, not every statement will be successfully interpreted by the text parser. If you try to get too conversational the protagonists will stare at you blankly or reply with a generic ‘Yeah’, and it can sometimes seem like you aren’t being heard (although you can always chalk this up to Grace and Trip being entirely self-absorbed). You can be in the middle of entering a statement only to have one of them start speaking, and submitting your speech will cause them to stop dead in the middle of whatever it was they were saying. After this happens a couple of times you sadly start to feel less like a houseguest and more like someone sitting at a keyboard.
Façade is about learning what Grace and Trip want to hear, saying it within the specified time frame, and then praying that it doesn’t upset the precarious balance you’ve been preserving with the other character. It quickly loses its entertainment value once you realise that it’s a bit of a guessing game with time limits; but a title that replicates the establishment and maintenance of real life relationships is never going to be ‘fun’ in the traditional sense of the word.
Maybe a better word to describe it is ‘intriguing’. Because the game is designed to simulate real life responses to actions, it effectively manages to conjure up that feeling of awkwardness you get when you’re trapped in the middle of an argument. With active intervention it’s possible to inspire Grace and Trip to rediscover their love, or to push one to leave after admitting a past affair or they felt trapped into accepting the other’s marriage proposal. It’s also likely that you’re going to offend the couple so badly that you’re forcibly removed from the apartment in at least one play-through – or you might not even make it across the threshold, as our gameplay video below shows.
Façade’s graphics looks as if they’ve been created using MS Paint so they’re not the best and it can be hard to read Grace and Trip’s expressions, but the visuals are just one of the things that make this title so iconic. Personally I found the latter’s voice to be a bit whiny, particularly when the situation wasn’t going his way, but overall the acting is very well done and the game manages to effectively string spoken segments together so they sound like complete sentences.
Mateas and Stern have in effect created a prototype for the most realistically-interactive video game in history. Grace and Trip’s world is one in which every word, action and hesitation has a number of unforeseeable consequences that affect all that follow. Though specifics may vary from play to play, the overall shape of the title is always similar; this means that players can’t simply follow a walkthrough and go through the motions, but must work to resolve the central conflict.
Despite its shortcomings, Façade is one of the most detailed and considered representations of social intercourse seen in a game. It can be hard not to get frustrated with Grace and Trip – or feel like your spelling and grammar isn’t terrible – but moments when you enter something clever and it seems like the virtual actor completely understands are totally satisfying and unlike any other experience.
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