Façade (interactive story)

Façade is an artificial-intelligence-based interactive story created by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. It was the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Slamdance Independent Games Festival and has been exhibited at several international art shows. In 2010, it was included as one of the titles in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die.

Overview

Façade puts the player in the role of a close friend of Trip and Grace, a couple who recently invited the player to their home for cocktails. This pleasant gathering, however, is somewhat damaged by the clear domestic confrontation between Grace and Trip upon the player's entry. Making full use of the incorporated language processing software, Façade allows the player to type sentences to "speak" with the couple, either supporting them through their troubles, driving them farther apart, or being thrown out of the apartment.

Incorporating elements of both interactivity and drama, Façade takes advantage of voice acting and a 3-D environment, as well as natural language processing and other advanced artificial intelligence routines, to provide a robust interactive fiction experience. The player can take an active role in the conversation, pushing the topic one way or another, as in an interactive stage-play. These stage-plays are stored as script text files which can be read after the player has finished.

Facade (disambiguation)

Facade is the exterior of a building.

Facade (from the French word façade) may also refer to:

See also

Alias (season 3)

The third season of the American drama/adventure television series Alias premiered September 28, 2003 on ABC and concluded May 23, 2004 and was released on DVD in region 1 on September 7, 2004. Guest stars in season three include Vivica A. Fox, Isabella Rossellini, Ricky Gervais, Griffin Dunne, Djimon Hounsou, Peggy Lipton, and Quentin Tarantino.

A seven-minute animated short titled The Animated Alias: Tribunal was produced for the DVD release of the third season. The short takes place between the second and third seasons.

Cast

Main characters

Recurring characters

Alias (board game)

Alias is a board game, where the objective of the players is to explain words to each other. Hence, Alias is similar to Taboo, but the only forbidden word in the explanations is the word to be explained. The game is played in teams of varying size, and fits well as a party game for larger crowds. The game is very competitive.

Alias has been developed in Finland and is produced by Nelostuote Oy under the brand name Tactic. The game has been on the market since the early 1990s and is one of the most popular party games in Finland. Along the years, many different versions of the board game have appeared: As well as the New Alias, the Alias family currently also includes the Junior Alias for children, the Alias travel game, and as the newest introduction, DVD Alias.

The name

The name Alias comes from the word alias, meaning also known as.

Basic Alias

The board in Alias is a "path" consisting of sequential curving numbers on a red background. The game contains 8 numbered groups. The game is divided into turns of about one minute of length. The teams play in turns, and on each team's turn, one of the team members has to explain words on word cards to the other team members. The other team members take guesses at the word, and words that have been correctly guessed earn the team one point per word. Explanation mistakes (meaning the explainer uses the word to be explained, part of it, or a derivative of it), and words passed over without being guessed take points away. The players move on the board as many places as they have earned points on their turn. If, for example, the team lands on the number 7, the word to be explained from the cards is word number 7. The first team to reach the goal wins. The game is recommended for players over 7 years.

Alias (Mac OS)

In Mac OS System 7 and later, an alias is a small file that represents another object in a local, remote, or removablefile system and provides a dynamic link to it; the target object may be moved or renamed, and the alias will still link to it (unless the original file is recreated; such an alias is ambiguous and how it is resolved depends on the version of OS X). In Windows, a "shortcut", a file with a .lnk extension, performs a similar function.

It is similar to the Unix symbolic link, but with the distinction of working even if the target file moves to another location on the same disk (in this case it acts like hard link, but the source and target of the link may be on different filesystems). As a descendant of BSD, OS X supports Unix symbolic (and hard) links as well.

Function

An alias acts as a stand-in for any object in the file system, such as a document, an application, a folder, a hard disk, a network share or removable medium or a printer. When double-clicked, the computer will act the same way as if the original file had been double-clicked. Likewise, choosing an alias file from within a 'File Open' dialog box would open the original file. The purpose of an alias is to assist the user in managing large numbers of files by providing alternative ways to access them without having to copy the files themselves. While a typical alias under the classic Mac OS was small, between 1 and 5 KB, under OS X it can be fairly large, more than 5000 KB for the alias to a folder.

Alias (season 1)

The first season of Alias premiered September 30, 2001 on ABC and concluded May 12, 2002 and was released on DVD in region 1 on September 2, 2003. Guest stars in season one include Sir Roger Moore, Terry O'Quinn, Quentin Tarantino, and Gina Torres.

Apart from Truth Be Told, the episodes of Alias are often unconventionally structured in that the title credits are usually shown well into the plot, almost as an afterthought. Also, usually a plot finishes at mid-episode and a new plot begins, so that every episode finishes with a cliffhanger. The impression thus created is that an episode will conclude the previous one and plant the seeds of the next one.

Main characters

Cast

Main characters