Ever a few years behind the times, I finally got a computer that the interactive fiction thing "Façade" can run on. This program is as close as anyone has gotten to "a story that reacts to your actions."

It’s an interesting concept, which boils down to "You visit your two friends at their apartment. You can walk around the room and talk to them. Sometime during this they will have a massive break down and you must try to talk them out of it… or make it worse by insulting them."

It works via natural language parsing and it’s the best NLP that I’ve seen, but it still doesn’t work that well. You type your text in and they react, but half the time the two characters thought I was talking to the wrong one, or they just wouldn’t understand what I was saying. Or they’d react with "That really helps us right now" without giving me the feeling that they’d actually understood me.

The whole thing feels more natural than a conversation tree but hurts as a game because I never felt like my actions in the world did all that much. Mostly I stood around and sipped my drink while two people sniped at each other. It was uncomfortable to listen to, so they have that realism down.

To contrast, I recently started playing Fable. (See? Behind the times.) I must say that I find Fable’s emote system, which basically gives you a series of gestures (laugh, flirt, fart, etc) to be much more comfortable. Isn’t that odd? One would think that something like typing in real worlds would feel more natural. However, it is often nebulous and frustrating. Just like real life, you don’t exactly know how someone is going to react to your words and that isn’t necessarily entertaining.

It could also be the text version of the uncanny valley where things are just close enough to real to make the player feel uncomfortable.

Façade does have some interesting parts to it, especially since it tries to build in dramatic beats. At one point Trip, the guy, summarized everything I’d said to him and then he reacted to it. (Too bad I hadn’t felt like I’d actually said half of that stuff) I wonder how much it would be improved by substituting its NLP stuff for an icon based system where you can make sure that your intent is getting across.