nVidia Claims Patent On Interactive Gaming Servers

joeblake writes: "nVidia apparently thinks that because they have control of the computer graphics market, they can control the world. nVidia has filed a patent stating their ownership of 'Interactive Gaming Servers and Online Community Forum'. How nVidia goes from graphics cards to gaming servers beats me."

Comments

Prior Art?

[VValdo]

I don't know if this has any relevency (I haven't really looked at the patent) but a ton of online games used to rank users back in the day on Bulletin Boards on the Apple ][ and match them against each other. These include role playing games as well as simple online video games. (I myself wrote a few online text-based video games that ranked users in like 1985)

There was also a bulletin board system called Proving Grounds that was basically a multiplayer adventure game played online that matched you up with people of your own skill level to do battle. Not with a web server, but the idea was the same.

As I recall, numerous MUDs would have entry levels for new users to get their skill levels up to the point they could go where all the regular users were.

If any networked game says something like "is this your first time here?" and then puts you in a different game with other users as users with preset accounts, wouldn't that be prior art for this patent?

W

It's not actually that bad.

[WasterDave]

If you look at it, what they're actually claiming a patent on is collecting people's scores and putting them on the WWW.

Now, admittedly if this all goes ahead it's going to piss a lot of people off. Customers, for instance. I'm sure Anandtech et al would have a thing or two to say about it as well. But it's no show stopper. It's not like they're suing John Carmack for writing network games or anything.

And besides, he was the prior art in this case - the patent was filed end of August '99.

Dave