Frustrations and Awakenings with ‘Facde’

I played Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas’s Façade before reading the excerpt on the game from Wardrip-Fruin’s Expressive Processing – I think if I had read the piece on Façade before playing it, I may have had more appreciation or patience for the game.  Initially, I decided I would act/enter text exactly as I would if I were a real guest in this particular situation.  I closed the door politely, avoided eye contact from the side of the room where Grace and Trip were arguing when he went to get her and answered graciously when spoken to.  This did not last, however, because I soon realized a) I would never be friends with people like this and b) Trip and Grace are ignorant, uptight psychopaths.  They would force you to choose sides and then, later, in some dramatic fashion, one would rehash what you allegedly agreed to with the other one.  The music was extremely dramatic and the facial expressions made by Trip and Grace started to terrify me.  I was so scared of them during the one game, I restricted myself from saying hardly anything – they didn’t seem to mind my silence and it resulted in Grace confessing she slept with an art major, Victor, the night before Trip proposed, thus jinxing their fabulous marriage.

I played Façade with serious intentions about four or five times.  I was kicked out during one game because I kissed Trip and told him his wife sucks – this seemed like a good idea at the time because Grace was down the hallway pouting – and Trip didn’t mind the first few times, but his guilty conscious must have caught up with him.  The other three or four times, Grace walked out and Trip stood there shoulda-coulda-woulda-ing before the curtain fell.  I tried everything to get them to reconcile – suggesting therapy (this was met with defensive responses), suggesting Grace was sad (“you’re saying I’m depressed?”/psycho face), suggesting they divorce (horrified faces/defensive responses) – I also said they should kill themselves because I lost all patience with them at one point.  Whoops.  There were numerous times my interjections were ignored and responded to with a “Let’s talk about our relationship” which also was frustrating to me but now makes a bit more sense after reading the article; Wardrip-Fruin explains that not playing into the topic that Grace and Trip are on can result in Façade mixing in a JDB that deflects the player’s action.  Thus, “Let’s talk about our relationship/Let’s talk about Grace.”

Wardrip-Fruin’s point that no computer program can understand arbitrary human language made me reflect back on my frustrations with Façade and acknowledge it was not a flaw in the game that Trip and Grace could not fully interact with me when I spoke.  Instead, as the excerpt on Façade states, the game’s statements are limited to “discourse acts” – agreement, thanking, referring to a topic and so on.  Clearly, Trip and Grace categorized my statements by such discourse acts – when I said something polite to what they said, they reacted warmly (only at the very beginning of the game) and would acknowledge if I said something about a topic they were familiar with – drinks, art, romance.  Overall, as the excerpt on Façade acknowledges, agency could be obtained in the game through accuracy in natural language understanding, however, such agency is limited due to computer programs lacking the ability to understand arbitrary human language which makes up daily interactions in people’s lives.

2 comments November 6, 2011