NEW MEDIA: Facade Finale

I have given, as is my wont, blow by blow impressions of Facade in various entries over the past week rather than in a finish-the-book/game/work of art-then-review-it manner that is more customarily done by the pros.  That alone should prove that I am not a legitimate reviewer of this piece as well as anything on literature or for that matter, life itself.  In the field of new media, I am a babe in the woods, er, field rather.  I am neither literary expert nor technology minded enough to give any sort of expert opinion.  Therefore, with that disclaimer in mind, you can at the very least trust my honesty (though always tinged just a tad with proper etiquette and empathy).

Perhaps driven by five years of end of semester routine, the first question upon finishing–and I would have to say that that is not really a true term here–Facade is whether I will "keep the book or sell it back for cash", in this case, is it worthy of its 800 mgs of hard disk space.  I would say yes, because I will no doubt go back to it in time and study it a bit more.

I have become fascinated with the process, especially after reading the Behind the Facade PDF that explains some of the work behind the piece.  However, as I’ve clearly noted, I don’t really understand how difficult all this is, or if from this point on, once it has been established, it becomes easier and more routine a thing to accomplish.  This of course, refers to the interactivity of the piece where user input is carefully being tracked and spit back out in direction of story.  I would hope that it can become a lot more complex without too much work, and I think basically of the movies and animation efforts of dozens of people drawing cells to produce something like Bambi or Fantasia.  It then becomes well worth any effort.

As a writer, I would have lost interest in the scenario after a couple of plays.  Aside from the lack of response, lack of time for input, or inappropriate responses received, which really belong under technical workings, I was not really into the story of Grace and Trip after the first go-around.  But this was not meant to be a masterpiece of drama; it is all right to start with a single event (marital fighting) and bring in a few clues from the past to dig out and enable the user to manipulate.  The question is where will we go from here. 

A lot of the grumbling I’ve heard over Facade is gamer-based.  This is not truly a "game" but aspires to become interactive drama (somebody said that somewhere, and I silently bow my head in acknowledgement but can’t remember where I read it to give proper credit–probably on the GTA site).  Even I, long-time reader and writer of literature and really new and flaky game-player, still often found myself in Facade with the attitude not of being a friend to Grace and Trip, but a "player" in an action sequence.  I appreciated that neither of these two came after me with a machete and I felt safe enough to goad them a bit and walk freely about without the fear of those horrid things that were after me in Silent Hill 2.

As to the graphics, while the comic strip drawings were well used in their natural advantage of denoting expressions, emotions, etc. in the simplest and clearest manner, this indeed may have worked against the piece where inappropriate reactions such as a scowl when I said something nice but clearly out of the program’s comprehension, and a less revealing but more realistic graphic might have covered this better.  (Scott McCloud’s "less is more"–the further you are away from realism the more obvious you can make something become by its universal element.)

I personally thoroughly enjoyed and learned from my experience with Facade, and am very grateful that people are not only working in this direction, but are willing to share it so freely and be so receptive to user input (unlike Grace and Trip–sorry, had to stick it in there!).  (Actually, there is such an elaborate system of how input is used to bring the story to closure of whichever end and it is extremely interesting to me.) 

I think where this will take me now is to move into writing those damned three stories I’ve been yapping about for the past couple months.  And I think what my plan is is to make the stories complete within themselves, that is, satisfying in a literary nature first, and then work to tie them in and make necessary edits and additions after the stories can stand on their own before I tie them together. 

My thanks again to Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas and their crew for giving me the opportunity to discover, and to Steve at The Great Lettuce Head for pointing out another path.