Creators: Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern
Group Members: Karen Aivadjian, Rita Ezadjian, and Sofia Staab-Gulbenkian
Facade
Artist Overview: Michael Mateas
Education:
-BS in Engineering Physics from the University of the Pacific (1989)
-MS in Computer Science from Portland State University (1993)
-Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (2002)
Previous work:
-Faculty member of Georgia Institute of Technology.
Current Work:
-Director of the Center for Games and Playable Media.
-Professor of Computational Media at University of California Santa Cruz
-Helped launch the Computer Game Design degree (the first of its kind in the UC system)
-Holds the MacArthur Endowed Chair and runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio with Noah Wardrip-Fruin
-EIS is one of the largest technical game research groups in the world
-Current group projects include: automated support for game generation, automatic generation of autonomous character conversations, story management, and authoring tools for interactive storytelling.
Co-Founded:
- Facade with Andrew Stern in 2005 (took 5 years)
Artist Overview: Andrew Stern
Education:
-University of Southern California
Previous work:
-Virtual Dogz, Catz and Babyz projects at PF.Magic
-Combined artificial intelligence with real-time interactive computer animation
-Full-time researcher at Zoesis Studios and USC's Institute for Creative Technologies
-Published and presented work at conferences on AI, interactive art and digital games
- Co-writer of the group blog grandtextauto.org from 2003-8 about interactive narrative, games, poetry and art
Current work:
-Since 2012, he’s joined a research team at the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz working on the Strategic Social Interactions Program (SSIM), aka "Good Stranger,” a DARPA funded $37M multi-year R&D effort to train tact and tactics to police and military recruits, to use less force when interacting with civilians
-Designs, writes and engineers lifelike interactive characters with social, pedagogical and dramatic intelligence, integrated with gesture and speech recognition
Andrew Stern (cont.)
Founded:
-Portland-based studio Stumptown Game Machine as a developer for ngmoco to build next-generation games for the iPhone
-Stumptown's first title, Touch Pets Dogs, was the #1 free app in the App Store for 5 days in November 2009.
Co-founded:
-Procedural Arts-an indie studio developing next-generation, personality-rich AI characters
-The interactive drama Façade.
-Intended to create “Party” but confirmed that it’s currently not moving forward
Description of Facade
-Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative
- Attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama
-Utilizes a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot.
-3D virtual world inhabited by computer controlled characters, in which the character experiences everything in the first person point-of-view.
-The player is allowed to choose their gender, then play the long-time friend of the rich, computer-controlled couple, Grace and Trip.
-During the player’s visit, a fight ensues between the couple and the player must react
-The player’s reactions (typed responses) to the couple’s accusations determines the fate of the marriage
-Can either help them reach a resolution or get kicked out of their house
- In the end, the game encourages the player to replay the situation and see how his or her interaction with the couple influenced their decision about their marriage
-The game tells the player the different ways the player could have reacted in order to achieve a different outcome
Programmatic Elements of Facade
-Unlike hypertext narrative or interactive fiction, the computer-characters actively perform the story without waiting for the player to enter a command or click a link
-Interaction is seamless as you converse in natural language and move and gesture freely within the first-person 3D world of Grace and Trip’s apartment
-AI is defined as “the science of making computers do things that require intelligence when done by humans”
-AI is used to control Grace and Trip’s personality and behavior, including emotive facial expressions, spoken voice, and full-body animation
-AI intelligently chooses the next story “beat” based on your moment-by-moment interaction, what story beats have happened so far, and the need to satisfy an overall dramatic arc
-Mateas’ definition of “beat”=entire scene fragment (all three characters interact)
-An innovative text parser allows the system to avoid the “I don’t understand” response that’s common in text-adventure interactive fiction
-AI is necessary for: story generation, story understanding, drama management, and autonomous characters
All information was acquired from: http://www.interactivestory.net and http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/reference%20articles/What%20is%20AI.html
Programmatic Elements of Facade (cont.)
-Contains 27 beats (only half might be activated during one play session)
-Each beat has a chain of narrative goals and variations/reactions depending on what the player does
-Each goal is made of JDBs (joint dialogue behaviors) that consist of up to five lines of dialogue
-2,500 JDBs in total (100 JDBs per beat)
Three types of story progression:
-Beat sequencer (manages all of the beats) and picks which one to activate when the other ends/is interrupted
-Beat gol sequencer (manages goals of the currently active beat) chooses variations based on player input
-Global mix-ins (topics that can interrupt the current beat) activated when a player brings up sex, divorce, alcohol, the view out the window, melons
How to Play the Game
Four common strategies:
-The Affinity Game: take Trip’s side or Grace’s side
-The Hot-Button Game: find topics that provoke the characters and follow their reactions
-The Therapy Game: try to help Grace and Trip understand themselves (has the strongest effect on which ending you reach)
-The Tension Level Toy: trying to calm down the rising tension within the game
You do not have to stick to one goal throughout a session, though Mateas says the game is most successful using “half-affinity” and “half-therapy”
Facade Demo
Related to Works from Class:
Recombinant Fiction (Robert Coover)
-Facade is generated through "beats" which mirror the organization of Coover's short fiction. Examples such as "The Elevator" show how links and meaning can be generated through pieces that are seemingly unconnected despite a few narrative throughlines (such as the existence of an elevator, the elevator girl, etc.) Similarly, Facade draws from a database of words the player inputs and pre-existing scenarios to produce meaning. While at times the AI does not produce seamless transitions, Facade relies on the player to fill in the gaps of meaning with characterization.
Videogame Theory (Jesper Juul, “Games Telling Stories”)
-”The player can tell stories of a game session”
-”Player may play to see a cut-scene or realise a narrative sequence”
-”You can't have narration and interactivity at the same time; there is no such thing as a continuously interactive story” Facade somewhat opposes this
-”The player inhabits a twilight zone where he/she is both an empirical subject outside the game and undertakes a role inside the game”
-While Juul argues that games are opposed to narrative, claiming "there is an inherent conflict between the now of the interaction and the past or prior of the narrative", Facade beaks this dichotemy between fiction and gaming to be false. The natural language AI integrates the interaction with the narrative by putting the player in control of it's direction completely, so long as the player chooses to participate, in the same way that a poem or novel is immersive if the reader chooses to read sympathetically to the text. Therefore, Facade is as narratively immersive as a book or poem, because the narrative pace engages with the player in real time, as opposed to a predetermined organization.
Related to Works from Class (cont.)
“Environmental narratives” (Henry Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture”)
-Creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience with:
-spatial stories that can evoke pre-existing narrative associations
-can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted
-can embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene
-provide resources for emergent narratives
-Narrative can also enter games on the level of localized incident/micro narratives
-Facade utilizes environmental storytelling, which is defined as Jenkins as possible in four ways; "spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives". The space that Facade takes place in is equal parts a stage and an evocation of real life; while it is possible to divine details of storytelling from the decoration of the apartment, it is equally possible for narrative to unfold from the characters within the story. The dinner party atmosphere draws on specific associations players may have, further enriching the mise-en-scene and creating texture for the storytelling to attach to. These elements combine to produce micro-narratives, which drive the overall narrative of Facade without seeming forced or unnatural. The transition from scripted event to storytelling could not happen without these micro-narratives, which help the player immerse themselves in the story.
Sources:
https://games.soe.ucsc.edu/people/michael-mateas (artist overview)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewstern (artist overview)
http://www.interactivestory.net (description/programmatic elements)
http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/michael-mateas-talk-on-facade/ (how to play the game
http://www.interactivestory.net/papers/MateasSternAIIDE05.pdf (programmatic elements)
http://www.interactivestory.net/papers/MateasSternGDC03.pdf (programmatic elements)
http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-gts/ (related to works from class)
http://interactive.usc.edu/blog-old/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Jenkins_Narrative_Architecture.pdf (related to works from class)