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

Looking at the patent...

[jmd!]

Looking at the patent, it seems they've patented a CGI ranking system. Bravo! What an invention. Who could have concieved of such a system except some brilliant mind at nVidia.

Oh, and battle.net.

And 10 year old Internet chess servers.

I think it's been touched on before...

[OneFix]

But it bears repeating. Many companies simply patent any ideas that their employees come up with. They don't care if it's valid or even falls into their specific realm, they simply file for a patent...

Most patents will be accepted (valid or not)...many patents will not be tested, some will be...When these "idiot patents" are brought against their targets, there are often hidden agendas...

It is really only for investors...you can say "We've had over 500 patents accepted this year"...it makes investors happy, because it at least looks like they are getting a huge return on their investment...

Clarification

[Rampant Atrocity]

Let me clarify what Nvidia is actually patenting, as the Slashdot headline and blurb are misleading.

Nvidia acknowledges that they didn't invent Gaming Servers. The patent reads:

In recent years multiplayer, online video games have become popular...See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,841,980, entitled "Distributed System for Communication Networks in Multiuser Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,823,879, entitled "Network Gaming System"; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,838,909, entitled "Reducing Latency When Synchronizing Access to a Multiuser Database over a Network.

Nvidia sees the following problem in prior art multiplayer gaming servers:

A problem arises in that the players often have differing skill levels and game attribute preferences. For example, one player may want to play "Quake" only against other players having a skill level at least equal to his or her own skill level.

So, their invention is an Interactive gaming server that basically "..runs at least one game having multiple levels of play and playable by a plurality of users simultaneously." (visit the site for more detail).

I still think the patent is utter crap, but it's certainly not as bad as the Slashdot headline made it out to be.

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