Going beyond the gaming ghetto

"Facade"
"Facade" skips standard video game tricks completely. It's more of an interactive drama than a game, really, but how this free PC download attempts to meet the challenges of artificial intelligence has relevance for gaming in the future.

The player, or instigator, plays the role of an invited guest to the apartment of Grace and Trip, an urban yuppie couple whose marriage is on the rocks.

Both Grace and Trip hope to use you to heal, or possibly further damage their marriage. Using simple typed commands you can engage them in conversation, or start them talking about another facet of their relationship. Walking through the couple's apartment and picking up their yuppie objets d'art triggers more dialogue.

Occasionally, the couple will ask you for advice or ask you to take sides. You can respond in kind and if "Facade" understands your advice, the story will adjust to the new scenario.

You can engage as a provocateur. In addition to typing some salty language and watching their response, you can hug, comfort or kiss Grace and Trip, breeding confusion and, in more cases than not, your eventual expulsion from the apartment.

I first heard about "Facade" over a year ago while doing research on how video games attempt to evoke emotion.  Back then Michael Mateas, a professor of artificial intelligence and entertainment at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Andrew Stern, an artificial intelligence developer and researcher, were on their fourth year developing their one-act interactive play about Grace and Trip.

Mateas / Stern The bickering Grace and Trip from "Facade" pull the player into their hell.

As Mateas and Stern described the creation of "Facade," the goal was to break the story into "beats" or specific behaviors built for a particular situation. The players’ actions as well as the evolving story determined the beats, which in turn built the story arc.

This process, as they described, amounted to abandoning the decision tree model in many of today's games that supports the illusion of all actions having consequences in favor of a more lifelike experience.

This particular story arc may not hold much allure to the typical gamer — or to any one other than Harold Pinter fans, for that matter. Their yuppie prattle had me wishing for an RPG hack. 

But when "Facade" actually works, that is, when Grace and Trip appear to understand your keyed-in responses and when your actions result in an ever downward spiraling string of accusations the feeling of breaking up their acidic relationship can be on par with taking out a "Halo 2" Covenant mothership.

'Genji: Dawn of the Samurai'
OK, so this is one is a war game. But rather than take out Nazis, you're fighting the good fight for 11th century Japanese feudalism. "Genji: Dawn of the Samurai" boasts an unusual inspiration: Game makers say the story line was inspired by "The Tale of Genji," an 11th century text that some literary types hail as the world's first novel.

Sony Yoshitsune Minamoto looks samurai fabulous in "Genji: Dawn of the Samurai"

However, beyond its setting and the names of a couple characters, the hack and slash-happy game shares little with the novel. "The Tale of Genji" is an epic concerning the numerous romantic and political entanglements surrounding a Japanese aristocratic court. There is little romance in the game "Genji" and any political parlay has been reduced to separating heads from shoulders.

But the game pays homage to the original text through graphics which aspire to a certain ancient Japanese idyllic. No forest scenes are complete without bubbling brooks and butterflies and wildflowers that look as if they were hand painted in neon colors.

Warriors flounce around in enough samurai costuming to keep Jean Paul Gaultier awake at night. And when those warriors clash, blood doesn't so much squirt but sprays into misty puffs of blood red.

"Genji: Dawn of the Samurai" is set in a time of national discord. A group of bad guys called the Heishi have disposed of Japan's aristocratic ruling class. Horrors! To help keep feudalism alive the player takes control of young aristocrat Yoshitsune Minamoto and Benkei Musashibo, a  warrior-monk — is there any other kind of monk in these types of games?

In the standard combat game the player can employ any number of attacks. In hairy situations the heroes can call upon a magical force calls Amahagane which slows the action — like "The Matrix's" bullet-time — to a more manageable level.

Almost too manageable, in fact, because after the player has mastered the simple combat moves and leveled up his character with the appropriate weapons the game is practically over. "Genji: Dawn of the Samurai" clocks in at about five hours of play.

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