January 15, 2006
Dr. Seuss and Bill O’Reilly Meet Grace and Trip
After a flurry of activity last year, Game-Brains.com took a brief hiatus over the past few months, but is now back with an improvised review of Façade that, among other things, channels the perspective of the right-wing news media:
Let’s take a look at how this game Façade works. Clearly, its designers, artificial intelligence researchers Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, are two deranged liberals using videogames to espouse subversive values to our youth. Michael and Andrew, do you really think that people want to interact with non-player characters in any sort of in-depth fashion? Would you not agree that Ronald Reagan was the greatest American president of all time? Do you actually think people want to be able to type their own dialogue to characters onscreen and have them respond in a believable way? What, except a passionate loathing of your own country and a disgusting love for the theories of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tung, would make you believe that gamers want to be able to guide the storyline of a game through their own actions?
January 17th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Despite the farcical nature of the O’reilly lense, there is a sort of anarchism in the idea of an interactive story. Any story is going to carry with it representative baggage, imposing its worldview through its depiction of causality. But Facade makes a step toward letting people fint their own story, and thus their own worldview. In this sense Facade is almost a rallying call for anarchy.