I was browsing through this year's list of
IGF finalists and I happened to spot a curious little offering...
Façade -
a one-act interactive drama
http://www.quvu.net/interactivestory.net/#facade
Quote:
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Façade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we are completing a three year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we are building a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the user (hereafter referred to as the player) experiences a story from a first-person perspective. Façade will be publicly released as a free download / cd-rom in early-to-mid 2004.
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I feel that the gameplay is somewhat akin to an IF title, only with AI and real-time rendered 3D characters.
Quote:
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This work is unlike hypertext narrative or interactive fiction to date in that the computer characters actively perform the story without waiting for you to click on a link or enter a command. 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 controls Grace and Trip’s personality and behavior, including emotive facial expressions, spoken voice and full-body animation. Furthermore, the 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. An innovative text parser allows the system to avoid the “I don’t understand” response all too common in text-adventure interactive fiction.
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Hmm...very interesting.
It is due for release in mid 2004. It has been in development for three years.
The duo responsible for this are
Michael Mateas and
Andrew Stern.
They are giving a lecture at GDC 2004 on
Beyond Finite State Machines: Managing Complex, Intermixing Behavior Hierarchies
