Procedural Authorship: A Case-Study Of the Interactive Drama Façade

The essence of the computer as a representational medium is procedurality – the ability of the computer to engage in arbitrary mechanical processes to which observers can ascribe meaning. Taking full representational advantage of the computer thus requires procedurally literate authorship, that is, artists and writers who are able to think about and work within computational frameworks; in the extreme case of developing new modes of computational expression, authors must be highly proficient in the use of general purpose programming languages. We examine issues of procedural authorship using the interactive drama Façade as a case study. Façade’s explicit design goal is to provide the player with local and global agency over the evolution of the dramatic experience; this requires a level of procedurality previously not implemented in interactive narrative.