Façade

It’s important to remember that Façade is not exactly a video game, but a “one-act interactive drama.” At first glance, it looks just like a game: it’s played out on a computer, it has 3-D graphics, and it involves lots of interaction between the player-character and the computer-controlled characters. In fact, I’m going to refer to it as a game throughout this review, mostly because “one-act interactive drama” is too unwieldy a label, and all the neologisms I can come up with to refer to it — compuplay, digidrama, etc. — are unbearably cheesy. But still, when playing Façade, it really helps to keep in mind at all times that what you’re playing is not quite a game, and that it requires a slightly different approach than the games you’re used to.

Most contemporary video games make some attempt to tell a story, and many of them allow the player’s actions to influence the ways in which that story progresses. A significant difference between these games and Façade is in the story being told: there are no princesses to be rescued or gang wars to be fought here, only a marriage in the midst of a meltdown. Your old friends Trip and Grace invite you over for dinner, but by the time you arrive at their door, they’ve already begun arguing. As the evening progresses, their insecurities, resentments, and misunderstandings bubble up, boil over, and spill out onto the floor, leaving you in the awkward position of trying to mop up the mess and hold their marriage together — or perhaps accelerate their breakup.

Façade‘s big break from the common video game mold is in the way you interact with Trip and Grace. As with most games, you can move around the 3-D space (in this case, the stage is the unhappy couple’s apartment) and manipulate objects, but for the most part, this type of interaction with the game is incidental. Most of your communication with the characters is verbal: you control the flow of the game by listening to what they say and replying in turn (or out of turn), typing out your dialogue in “normal” English. Natural-language parsers have been around since Eliza and Adventure, but Façade isn’t about Rogerian parlor tricks or simple imperatives; the characters respond directly to the things you say, not only verbally but emotionally. They’re pleased when you flatter them, angry when you insult them, and try to read between the lines you utter to figure out what you’re really trying to tell them, even as you try to work out what they themselves are getting at.

In their notes, creators Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern talk about agency as the idea that the player should have meaningful influence over the events that they play through in both the short and long term. What’s interesting about Façade, though, is the amount of agency the other actors — the computer-controlled ones — have. In most games, computer-controlled characters will simply stand around, waiting for you to do something, to push their buttons. Trip and Grace, on the other hand, don’t have time to wait for you to speak; they’re going to air their dirty laundry whether you’re contributing to the conversation or not. Early on, if you don’t say anything for a while, they’ll get nervous and switch to a semi-random topic in an effort to kick-start the conversation; as the evening goes on and the tension mounts, you’ll have to butt into their argument to get a word in edgewise, and as likely as not will get snapped at for interrupting.

The ability of the game’s characters to keep things moving even when you, as both audience and protagonist, aren’t keeping up your end of the conversation is a big part of what makes Façade successful. Another contributor to its success is the ability of the characters to express emotion, not only in their words, but in the tone of their voices and the looks on their faces. Even in the game’s prologue, a message left on your answering machine by a nervous Trip, it’s clear in his stammer and his too-bright tone that something is up. The strain in Trip and Grace’s relationship is on display in their facial expressions as well, and the flickers of doubt and annoyance that flash across their faces before they can cover them up with a fake smile are something that’s rarely (if ever) been done on a computer.

Like so many video games, Façade seems at times to be more a tech demo than a finished work. In this case, however, the technology in question is not a new sub-pixel rendering or cel-shading technique for the eyes to feed on, but a means by which emotions can be played with and manipulated. Even the game’s rough edges — and as the product of two researchers instead of a well-funded development studio, there are rough edges aplenty — serve to make the scene more tense and awkward. A lagging language parser can make the conversation seem at times like a series of non-sequiturs, or it can make it seem like the characters really are having a hard time talking to each other rather than at each other. Beyond the subtle facial expressions, the game’s graphics are rudimentary, but even that just makes you feel more tense, less connected — and more sensitive to the painfully awkward scene playing out around you.

There are certain skills you pick up when you’ve played a few video games: you understand instinctively how to read a life meter, where to look for a 1-up, what to expect inside a crate. Façade, however, requires a completely different set of skills in order to “read” it: social, even therapeutic skills that aren’t normally exercised in the context of a video game are necessary here in order to “win” and drive the story to your desired outcome. Once you’ve played it a few times, though (and you’ll want to play it more than once in order to see the different directions the story can head off in) and gotten the hang of conversing with Trip and Grace, you’ll begin to try to manipulate them in ways that break from the normal scripts — getting Trip to flirt with you or throw you out, getting Grace to drink too much or call her parents back. This repeated testing of boundaries, of seeing what you can or can’t get away with, of looking for a “perfect” playthrough — this is a skill that we do learn from video games. It’s important to remember that even when you’re playing with something that’s not exactly a video game, you can sometimes still treat it like one.