Behind Façade: An Interview with Andrew Stern and Michael Mateas

To be interactive drama, an experience should have rich, emotive, socially-present characters to interact with, and a strong sense of story progression that is organically and dynamically shaped by the player's interaction.

To keep things minimal, from both an aesthetic as well technical perspective, we wanted to find a scenario that would have the least number of characters while still delving deeply into issues about people's inner lives. It's amazing the scarcity of satisfying interactive experiences that are actually about people's lives--subject matter that is, of course, the heart of the best literature, cinema, theater and television.