New genre in the making: the social physics puzzle

[J T]

A few years ago, there was this experimental game called Façade that had you going over for cocktails with two friends whose marriage was very much on the rocks. It was like a videogame version of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The game allowed you to type whatever you wanted to say to the characters and the AI would attempt to respond intelligently to you. It was effectively like doing improv theatre with robots in a weird one act play. The AI couldn't always interpret your meaning well, but when it worked it was a really fascinating experience. (You can still download it for free at this link if you're interested)

The creators of that game have further developed their A.I. and are now developing a new game called Prom Week where there is a group of teenagers getting ready for prom. You'll have open-solution social goals like get the school nerd to become prom king or bring peace to feuding jocks. You'll have to use social skills to solve these puzzles, but there will be many possible solutions. The goal is to bring RPGs out of the realm of 'choose your own adventure' text choices. The game sounds really promising and they are thinking of it as a new genre currently labeled as a "social physics puzzle". It's going to be built into facebook and have horrible "casual" graphics, which I'm not excited about, but the AI sounds really spectacular and the game design is quite innovative in theory. This is an experiment to keep an eye out for:

Story:
https://games.soe.ucsc.edu/project/prom-week

Developer commentary:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3414 ... search.php