Although Façade may not sound like a traditional game by today's standards, especially when run through classic definitions of "game," Mateas says 15 years ago, if The Sims was to have been described to game designers as a hypothetical design, they might have said that it wasn't a game either. Mateas finds the term "game" bendable and is optimistic that the definition is expanding. "We took Façade to the Independent Game Developer's Conference last year, and so, right there, the term game seems to be OK to apply to Façade. I think 'game' will turn into a very large umbrella term, and you'll have to refer to more-specific things under it. So things like Façade may be referred to as interactive dramas or something. And I think 'game' will come to mean, sort of roughly, something more specific than 'interactive experience,'" Mateas explains.
Mateas creates another narrative with his games-and-new-media blog called Grandtextauto.org. He and four others, including Stern from Façade, wanted to create a blog modeled after a conference panel, where people talk among themselves about a specific theme and then invite the audience to comment and elaborate on the ideas discussed. A search-based "drama manager" is another of the Experimental Games Lab's projects. While only a technical name, the drama manager technology is an AI component that will work above or beside an open-ended gameworld, intervening to make longer-term story structure, not branching structures, happen.
"Drama manager has a model in its head of what this open-ended world will look like," Mateas explains, "and [it] makes decisions based on that, such as 'Let's remove this object from behind Clare's back,' or 'Let's give this NPC a goal to talk or to run away from the player,' so it's constantly intervening in ways that guide the experience toward interesting narrative directions but not in a sort of scripting or branching way."
But will the average gamer have any interest in playing games with boundless freedom? Aren't well-defined goals actually a plus for some players? "In part, I work on experiences that I would like to play [laughs]. I think a lot of designers do, actually," Mateas agrees that "the jury is out on whether there's a big section of the population that would like to play these games."
At IGDC, an attendee approached Mateas, who was playing Façade, and asked, "What is this?" Mateas refers to the comment as "great." "It just doesn't look like any existing genres," he defends. "Gamers have been trained on what the sort of permissible genres are. And games that do genre-blending, when innovation happens, [end up producing] games like The Sims, which really just sort of '[from] out of nowhere' create these new genres. And that's relatively rare."
Regardless of the best efforts of The Sims, Façade, and other story-driven, free-roaming "games," many people still associate games with pure amusement that, Mateas says, is prone to acceptance by audiences of children and early teens. "I think there's a sort of hangover of '80s arcade culture on the games scene or in some people's minds. And people like the Serious Games Initiative folks feel they have to fight against it in some way. I grew up in '80s arcade culture, so I loved it. I think, in some, the stereotypes of that culture are what people feel the need to sort of defend themselves against when they talk about 'serious' games."
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