Maybe “structured content”?

Anyhow, since Noah does explicitly define what he means by “script”, if he leaves it as is, I can live with it.

For example, we titled a paper “Structuring Content in the Façade Interactive Drama Architecture”. By “content”, we mean the essentially same thing you do here as “script”.

Pursing this different approach, did you and Michael have any internal terminology that might be useful here? I could just call it “mintly” — or something else that has no baggage — if I was adopting a term with some prior connection to Facade itself.

Something like “narrative content” might work. It has a similar meaning to “script”, but without implying linearity in structure.

If I may be so bold, I’ll take the liberty to illustrate how this term would look in your text, to help us get a feel for it. These are just suggestions, please ignore if inappropriate.

From section 8.5 paragraph 16:
“One can see this clearly by looking at Façade’s narrative content.”

8.5, Paragraph 23:
“While character behavior in Façade is largely driven by narrative content, it doesn’t feel as though it takes place in a series of scripted segments, but rather as a continuity.”

Section 8.6, paragraph 13:
The SimCity effect is one way to build the experience of agency. Façade’s narrative content demonstrates another.

Etc.

But no, I don’t think it’s particularly necessary or terribly important to do so.

Maybe “dynamic content”?

I don’t know, there may not be a perfect solution here. You do define your use of the term “script”, so that helps…

Hey — how about “goodies” ? ;-)

As for the main argument, that’s an interesting issue. One part of my main argument — that we need to pay attention to how digital media systems operate, not just what they look like from the outside — I’m pretty much treating as established by this part of the manuscript. But I could return to it here. Another part of the argument — that the Eliza, Tale-Spin, and SimCity effects are useful for thinking about the relationship between system processes and audience experiences — is explicitly what I’m trying to connect to in this section. I guess it’s not working?

Maybe what I’m looking for is actually not related to Façade, but only pointed to by the queasiness I’ve been expressing here: I’m not finding enough signposts and revisits of the throughline of your main argument in the different chapters. What do you think?

I think it might be interesting to draw another distinction, between sorts of systems that are flexible enough to assemble stories into different shapes, but I haven’t done that here. Do you think it’s important that I do so in the book? If so, I might have to add another example, or take one of my existing examples in a significantly different direction.

I need to rewrite this to make clear that the uses of autonomy and coordination should really be design decisions, rather than something we assume there’s a “right” way to do from the outset.

And, of course, I should probably also note that people were, before Facade, perfectly happy to do character coordination in projects that grew out of an animation tradition (e.g., Improv, if memory serves) rather than an AI tradition.

Andrew, I’m glad you think the drawing of relationships between systems is working. I know you’ve been quite critical of Facade in some postmortem-style discussions. So maybe I can ask you, even though you’re obviously biased, the same question: Does this seem like a one-sided discussion of the project?

Maybe the solution is to add another word? For example, I could call it a “dynamic script” or something of the sort.

The term “script” has a lot of linearity baggage to it, not just in the context of drama, but also in game development.

I’m trying to think of another single umbrella term… Maybe “system”, but that doesn’t allude to the narrative drive that “script” does. Maybe “plan”, since ABL is a reactive planner, and “plan” doesn’t have the linearity baggage.

“Narrative intelligence” seems accurate, but it’s cumbersome.

Or maybe I’m not totally getting why you chose “script”.

Michael, any thoughts?

Richard’s point about authoring bang-for-the-buck is valid, although I disagree that it is because the characters aren’t strongly autonomous. I think the public has some misconception about how much authoring actually went into Facade — a misconception that is our fault, for “bragging” that Facade took two people five years to make, presumably totalling ten person-years of work. Actually we did other things while developing Facade; for example I worked full-time at Zoesis for over a year, and Michael was full-time at Georgia Tech for over 2 years. After the project we sat down and tallied the Facade work up to be six person-years of work. More importantly though, about 75% of those six person-years was spent architecting, building infrastructure, and developing authoring idioms (i.e., R&D); therefore less than two person-years was spent on actual authoring of beats, which includes behavior programming, animation and testing. In other words, with this architecture in hand, two trained people could crank out another interactive drama equivalent to Facade in less than a year. So the authoring bang-for-the-buck ratio is probably a little better than is normally assumed.

(Note, your typical 2-year game production, e.g. Weapon Death Spiral 4000, with its 50 hours of grinding gameplay, requires 10+ person-years of authoring of levels, animation, AI, testing…)

Anyhow I think the issue at hand here is, for any interactive character/story system, what is its potential for generativity. Richard’s mention of emergence brings me back to question I asked the other week — where would you draw the line between story “emergence” from sandbox style games, and story “generation”? Does “emergent” story fall out of a slightly flexible system, and “generated” story from a highly flexible one, referring to the terms of your discussion of Universe?

Serious critical treatment is something games rarely receive; such treatment would benefit both developers and players.

I thank Noah for what he’s put together here, especially the way he relates different systems to one another.

I think you are setting up a false dichotomy here: seeing agents as autonomous and seeing them as coordinated performers are two compatible views – they are not exclusive. In fact, in our current project, we are treating agents as *both*. It is certainly true that agents need to be participating in coordinated practices for dramatic situations to arise – but they also need to be unique autonomous individuals so that we get emergent *variations* on situations.

The most common criticism of Facade from game industry folks is that the bang-for-buck (amount of dramatic content gained for the amount of authoring required) is too low. This low ratio is, to my mind, a direct result of not treating the agents as autonomous individuals. Unique autonomous individuals operating within the guidelines of a script gives emergent variation within a dramatic situation – just what is needed to raise the bang-for-buck ratio.

(I don’t want these remarks to be taken as criticism. I am a big fan of Facade – it is a towering achievement).

Maybe I’m just too familiar with the examples and you’re right that simply introducing this one is sufficient. Maybe I am (unfairly) asking for criticism of a sort out of place in this book. Maybe I’m mis-anticipating how the throughline of your book and how it will play out.

Once again, I feel like I have to admit that this online reading method is just not working for me, because I can’t see the whole picture enough to make substantive comments on a daily post, save for very specific, even pedantic ones.

I don’t actually want to have this chapter include the definitive piece on Facade — I want to use Facade as an example toward the overall arguments of my book. Are there parts of what you propose that you think are particularly missing from this book, rather than things you would like to see someone condense and put into print?

(sidenote: an interesting challenge for this peer review project is the reader’s inability to “look ahead” to see if topics that come to mind are coming up later. The surprise of serialization works for fiction, but I’m scratching my head about whether or not it does for nonfiction, at least nonfiction of this sort).