Feature: 'The Designer's Notebook: You Must Play Façade, Now!'

In today's main Gamasutra feature article, Ernest Adams uses his Designer's Notebook column to analyze new interactive drama title Façade and suggest why, in his opinion, it is one of the most important games ever created. Adams comments of the long-in-development title, which was an Independent Games Festival finalist in 2004 and has now been released for free: "Mateas wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Façade, and he and Stern have written several other articles as well, so there is quite a lot of published material about it already. I have deliberately avoided reading any of it, however, because I wanted to experience Façade as a gamer, not as a game developer. I don't know for sure what they were trying to do; I only know what they did do and how I feel about it, which is deeply impressed. Façade isn't a game in the formal sense of the word. It's a one-act interactive drama. That genre doesn't get much attention these days—we're more concerned with storytelling in general—but interactive drama is vital to the future of the medium, and Façade is a big step forward in that field." You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject (no registration required, please feel free to link to the article from external websites).