Façade

Façade: Interactive Drama Game

Explore an immersive, AI-driven drama experience with FaÎade, featuring two AI-controlled characters navigating relationship troubles.

What is Façade?

Façade is an interactive, artificial intelligence-driven drama video game developed by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern and released in 2005. Players assume the role of a longtime friend of Grace and Trip, a married couple who have invited the player over for drinks as they attempt to work through marital difficulties.

Gameplay in Façade centers around conversing with Grace and Trip using natural language input. The two AI characters recognize speech and respond emotionally and contextually. Their reactions and dialogue are unscripted, leading to emergent behavior and making each playthrough unique. As tensions build, the player must attempt to mediate and improve Grace and Trip's strained relationship through their choices in conversation.

From a technical perspective, Façade utilizes several advanced AI frameworks to drive its autonomous characters and react to the player organically. The game integrates speech recognition, natural language processing, emotion modeling, content production from drama manager trees, and other complex systems to perceive the player's text input and output context-appropriate dynamic dialogue and actions.

Since its release, Façade has been hailed as a groundbreaking demonstration of interactive storytelling and emotionally responsive AI characters in games. It received numerous awards upon release and is considered a seminal work in the artistic exploration of video games as a narrative medium.

Façade Features

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