Create a work of Interactive Fiction
One popular view of interactive fiction maintains that the actual narrative is not created during gameplay, but when the player recounts his experience - either to friends or in his own head - and reconstructs a narrative around it. The problem with this approach is that there is usually no tangible record of this narrative, and any attempts to capture it inevitably result in a boring trace of the actions of the game that fails to zero in on the elements that are important to the user. This is because, when game designers say that their games create interesting retrospective narratives, they are usually doing so as a sort of afterthought, to cover up for the fact that there is no overarching dramatic structure to their game.
The goal of Cold Call is to start with the assumption that the point of playing the game is to create an artifact that is interesting and coherent as a story. Therefore the "game" becomes a sort of performative assistant, that helps the player/author create an entertaining game trace.
The premise is simple: you receive a call from an automated system that wants you to make a donation to an organization. The game makes use of simple voice recognition and voice synthesis, both provided by the Java Media Framework, so interaction with the game is through a microphone. At first, the system asks you some normal questions and prompts you to respond with simple words, such as yes and no, or perhaps numbers. But soon it becomes more interested in you as a person, and tries to coax you into revealing interesting information about yourself. The game takes advantage of the fact that people like to talk about themselves, and this also makes for interesting listening.
At the end of the game, you receive an MP3 of your game.
At any time, the player can chose to hang up, but then she wouldn't have a very interesting story. I realize that putting this much responsibility on the player would seem to turn this into little more than a bad mix between Mad Libs and an audio program, but for new goals (interactive narrative) we must expect a new kind of gameplay. Plus, much of the emphasis of the program will be placed on ensuring a satisfactory dramatic arch.
So, the question becomes, how can you make a coherent story with a satisfying dramatic arch out of a call from an automated phone system?
A typical game of Cold Call might go something like this:
(Mechanical voice)