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Nintendo Files Patent For Game That Plays Itself
Kotaku points out a recent patent filed by Nintendo which automates gameplay unless the user specifically chooses to play a particular part of the game. Quoting: "The new system, described in a patent filed by Nintendo Creative Director Shigeru Miyamoto on June 30, 2008, but made public today, looks to solve the issue of casual gamers losing interest in a game before they complete it, while still maintaining the interest of hardcore gamers. The solution would turn a game into a full-length cut scene of sorts, allowing players to jump into and out of the action whenever they wanted. But when played this way, gamers would not be able to save their progress, maintaining the challenge of completing a game without skipping or cheating."
Let's look at it this way: this is combining simple, linear bots into the storyline which play as the first person in the event that the main player gets bored.
Am I the only one who sees this as a bit obvious and un-patent-worthy? Games have been doing this for a while during Demo screens... just without the story advancement.
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Square-Enix has prior art on their side with Final Fantasy XII.
Or, at least, Progress Quest with the addition of an option to play it. Frankly, I don't see why adding an option to play a game is defensibly patentable. I mean, I could choose not to play it without any special technology at all!
nintendo didn't file the patent, the patent filed itself.
For years people have been programming entire play-throughs of games using programmable inputs on emulators.
This is the same concept, you input an exact sequence of events for the controller, that will exactly complete a part of the game, or the entire game if you want. But instead of the tool-assisted-speed-run community doing it, it is the developers themselves this time.
It is very very complicated to program input commands for a game and doing a run through of an entire game is incredibly laborious. You need to now each frame, every aspect of the game, and compensate and adjust for each factor. And randomness? Some programmed inputs for games have luck manipulation in them. For example, in the Mega Man X series the boss A.I. would behave seemingly random in their attack patterns. So if you input attack commands and the boss randomly jumped over you, you would need to input direction commands to compensate for having to fire in a new direction. But once you commit to those programmed commands you have no control over how the A.I. is going to behave the next time you execute the script. But, for the MMX series, there are certain inputs if the player makes them, such as dashing twice then jumping, that make the bosses attack in the same way over and over again eliminating any randomness. But programming a single boss fight in a nearly two decade old Mega Man game for the SNES takes hours and hours of programming and testing.
It would be more logical for Nintendo to ship a DVD with a video walkthrough of the game. Or smarter, create a Nintendo YouTube channel featuring video walkthroughs of each level.
People the day Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) came out uploaded the entire game level by level and how to beat each level.
Nintendo recently hired tournament fighting game player David Sirlin to produce tutorial videos for playing Nintedo's Supure Smash Brothers Brawl game for Wii.
Watching an A.I. that is going to take hours and hours of programming beat a level in a meticulously perfect and robotic fashion isn't going to improve the gaming experience for anyone. Games already have easy, normal, and hard modes. Do we really need to dumb down Mario even more because kids can't finish them?
Video walkthroughs, especially free ones on YouTube, should be sufficient enough to help people beat part of a level. If you can't manually beat part of a game...the you can't do it at that time. Practice or give up. What happened to losing?
In some of Nintendo's top selling game you lose. Wii Sports, Mario Kart, Smash Brothers, there are is only one 1st place. I don't want to see developers WASTING time programming A.I. to help out the scrubs and novices beat games designed for challenging people.
How do we know that Nintendo won't start dumbing down games to make them beatable for even barnyard animals? Hey Timmy the cat beat Super Mario Universe just press the A.I. button...
Or finds the game too difficult?
I don't want to come home and find my Wii browsing for tech-porn.
IIRC Angband bots did that.
...they need to make a Wii that goes to my job for me. I enjoy playing the games, so I have that part covered. What's next, a Wii that drinks my beer and has sex with my girlfriend?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/9/7/new-from-squareenix/
Enough said
Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
Andy Grove: "Not Much."
Somebody's butthurt.
You're certainly one to talk.
Though, personally, I'd have to say that FFXII was the first Final Fantasy game I've genuinely enjoyed since the SNES. Don't like gambits? Me neither. That's why you don't use them.
That said, with the right sort of game it might be a good idea... We've all watched movies and been angered by the stupid decision made by one of the characters ('Go reft indy! Go reft! THE REFT TUNNEL!!!!').
In Soviet Russia, games plays without YOU.
If you use the ANTAGonizer patch and maybe before that, hitting M in the planet management screen will automate planet management.
Also, if you place a certain file into the base directory of it, the entire game will play itself.
The idea is obvious what is hard is to do it for a specific game.
For example, in Master Orion 2 you could choose to automate ship battles, although the automation sucked.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
This will never stand because of this: http://www.progressquest.com/
--Coder
Nintendo has always played the legal card to the maximum extent possible, going all the way back to the days of draconian contracts that forbade you from making a game for anyone else if Nintendo published one of your games. They tried to control even how much you can advertise. It got ruled invalid eventually, but in the meantime, yes, they did try to put anyone out of business who no loner toes the Nintendo line.
Or here in Europe they tried to strong-arm the retailers into what they can and can't sell, and basically used the European market as an experiment in whether they can make more money with only a handful of games and restricting access to anything else. They actually got slapped with an anti-trust for that, and were found guilty. Worse yet, it turned out that they knew they're in violation of the law, and had planned to violate it, thinking they can make more money than the fine can possibly be. (Wrong guess.)
To get back to patents and to more recent times, they also patented or filed for patent:
- the XBox Live, basically
- emulation of its own consoles, again, to try to keep other people from doing it (and, yes, they tried to bully emulator developpers before)
- weird stuff, like comparing each other's avatars online, never mind that people have been holding costume contests in COH since the fucking launch in 2004
- something as broad as making a stage magician kinda game/sim
- a "wearable" controller to digitize body motions, never mind that motion capture has been done before like that for ages
- a rechargeable game controller never mind that chargers like that existed for mice, headsets, and everything for freaking ages before that
- just about anything you can put a motion detector into, from bikes to teddy bears
- horror games, or at least stuff like hallucinations or hearing voices in games, never mind that neither is new, and an insanity sim had even been made to train police in how to deal with dementia people
Etc.
Some of those seem to even exist just to keep others from doing it. E.g., they filed for a patent for console online gaming, at a time where they were publicly bashing it and saying they have no intention to do that.
Frankly, I don't get the hardon some people seem to get about Nintendo. While they do have a couple of talented designers, the management has an uninterrupted history of being evil fucks that make MS look good by comparison. They tried every possible way to lock competitors out, and developers in, some of which MS so far never even dreamed about. E.g., I don't remember MS suing anyone for developing for the Mac too. They too broke anti-trust laws. Etc.
And at least the previous management had no problem with even insulting its customers, especially if, god forbid, they're asking for a genre Nintendo isn't currently selling. Yamauchi publicly called RPG gamers "depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games", for example.
The only thing that changed that was the GameCube being the second dud in a row, which prompted a mellowing out of attitude. If they ever get back in a positio
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
A long time ago (we're talkin' 1987 or so here), I wrote a Klondike solitaire game for the PC (CGA, whoo hoo). One of the controls was to toggle auto-play on/off. When enabled, the game would play for you (according to some algorithm I made up[1]). There was even a speed control too, so you could slow it down to see it doing its stuff, or speed up, to the point of having it finish off the game in a flash. It would even quit the game when it saw there were no further possible moves.
Prior to that, I had a history of modifying preexisting BASIC games to self-play, just for fun, and to see how far I could theoretically go if I had perfect and infinitely fast gaming reflexes (which is far from the reality...).
[1]
I remember running a test to see how often it won if it played the whole game start to finish -- it ended up winning about 1/15 of the time (this was using single-card flips from the hand).
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I'm fairly sure IBM already patented patenting ideas patenting itself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Years ago when I was a game tester at Sega, there was a guy in the next cubicle who was unfortunate enough to be stuck with "Barney's Hide and Seek".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barney's_Hide_and_Seek [wikipedia.org] Though he could generally be heard to be muttering "kill me" over and over to himself, he had the advantage over the rest of us because whenever he wanted to pretend like he was working, all he had to do was slump in his chair with his controller held limply in his hands, doze off, and yes, the game would play itself. The idea,evidently, was that kids of a certain age wouldn't have the attention span or skills necessary to help Barney do whatever it is he does, and so an auto-pilot feature would kick in if you stalled long enough.
McDonalds Files Patent for Hamburger that Eats Itself.
The New York Times Files Patent for Newspaper that Reads Itself and then Complains to Self about it's Left-wing Bias.
Internet Forum Trolls File Patent for Web Browser that Rick Roll's Itself.
They typically get dismissed as non-games, or as Nintendo abandoning the hardcore gamer, where 'hardcore' is defined as 'FPS'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Mauldin et al., ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System, Fifth Biennial Conference of the Canadian Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence, London Ontario, May 16, 1984.
Rogue had a storyline in it - okay, not exactly a really complex one, but a storyline nonetheless... and this thing plays it automatically, in case people don't want to play it themselves! Yup, people have been making self-playing games since forever.
I'm a casual gamer. Nowhere near hardcore. Partly because of lack of interest, partly because I dont have time to become a good paddle jockey.
One example of a game where I would have liked this feature is Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii. I absolutely loved this game for the puzzles and roaming around and then suddenly, you're confronted with sudden harsh treatment for a grinding session that only looks and feels like that: a grinding session. Typically, the "scene's boss".
While I managed to finish the game, there are a couple of ones that I basically turned off the game after a couple of attempts. It made me feel like it was keeping me away from the game. A passage of rights that didn't have much purpose on *my* gameplay.
Now I know this might very well be due to this particular game itself but the pattern is throughout the game industry, and that's what turning off some prospective players.
While bot-supported games is nothing new, the fashion in wich this patent attempts to use them is an interesting idea.
In my view however, it's not worthy of a patent in itself. Games should always have been like this, with some kind of "assist me here" option/widget to get people (with a life) moving on with the game.
Sorry to say this but this is more wrong than it is right. I can see why they would want to make games that the casual just put aside and jump back in when they feel like it. But for fucks sake, that's not why video games are cool.
I, for one, need to earn something while playing the game. Be it experience, skill or sheer amusement. The best games, that I remember most vividly, where those that tortured my brain and my hands. That made me swear and hate the enemies. The one that gave me a sense of "I fucking did it" once I was done. What good is a game that lets you escape from all that. Wait a moment. Escapeism for Escapeism? That's a cheap shot.
Unless they give me some incentive (added bonus, extra trophies, seperate ending) this will be a kick in the face for all hardcore gamers. Right now, if you want to see the end of a game for yourself you need to play and BEAT it (Lamers cheat or go to Youtube). With this every idiot could basically see the end of any given game without putting any real effort into it. That's clearly not how cult games are born. Some of the hardest games on the planet have a distinct following that recruits from the people that love to bitch about how hard it was.
This is good for the casual gamers and therefore an insult to the hardcore audience of supposedly the same titles. That's like having a guy join a Gold Medal sprint race on a motorbike just because he doesn't want to train as an athlete.
Let's see what they do with it but so far it sounds like a ridiculous idea. Probably will go nuclear like Guitar Hero and ruin the status quo for all "serious" gamers. What good is talking to someone about a game who always answers "Dunno, I had that section on auto pilot". God Dangit!
Indeed, one of the things that I've noticed is that hardcore gamer isn't something that Nintendo ever really aspired to. Not that they should because the so called "hardcore" gamers make up a much smaller portion of the pie than more casual ones.
Look at the older games and only a relatively small number could be reasonably defined as for hardcore gaming. And usually it was because you really needed to have a hint guide to finish them or were ridiculously designed. Karate kid, I'm looking at you.
FPSes suck on a console, they just suck, the controls are terrible and ultimately very little can change that. A keyboard and mouse is a much better choice for that sort of gaming. You shouldn't have to play every consolve version starting with the SNES to be comfortable with the controls. You should be able to pick it up in a few minutes. If it takes longer than that, the controls need to be fixed as they are terribly, terribly broken.
How about that 80's tic tac toe game that could be set to number of players zero and Global Thermal Nuclear War game that you had to dial in to play and it would take over playing for you if you got cut off.
The WOPR doesn't count as prior art?
--
Here's the deal. The storyline of FFXII was great, and that's the only reason I finished it. That, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the game play which was in no way "the most adult" and since that's what we're talking about here you might want to keep it on track.
I always asked myself, what would it be like if they made a game I could play well while doing 10 other things? Well, they did it, and it's not very fun, not to mention that the characters are 100% interchangeable it almost seems like every aspect of gameplay was designed to make it as insignificant and ignorable as possible.
They really should have just put the story together as an FMV and sold that for $30 I would have been much happier.
And have a game that was already a 70 hour waste of time become a 120 hour waste of time because the combat system was designed to function without constant input?
FPSes suck on a console, they just suck, the controls are terrible and ultimately very little can change that. A keyboard and mouse is a much better choice for that sort of gaming.
But how do you plan to fit four keyboards and four mice around a single TV in a social gaming scenario?
Nope, it's not even remotely the one I'm refering to. The quote about RPG gamers is from an 1999 interview.
But, yes, he did do a lot of stupid quotes in his time, including the one you linked to. Telling me that I play boring games, and that I should stop playing them for no other reason than that all the RPG developers left Nintendo... isn't exactly going to make me like him.
Especially because of this: he didn't play either kind of games, and took pride in not having played any game ever. So _how_ does he fucking know which are boring and which aren't? On what knowledge does he base his presuming to tell me what to play? Oh, wait, he's just telling me to buy his snake-oil and stop buying the competition's. And not even in nice terms.
I mean, picture me coming and saying something like, "I haven't played any MMO, and I'm proud I never blew my money on those, but I know that Vanguard rules and WoW is crap. Only depressed losers play WoW. Stop playing that boring game now." (Just hypothetically.) Wouldn't you say, "so how would you know, if you haven't played either?"
I mean it's like a nun telling you which sexual position feels better. Or like a vegan telling you which meat tastes better and which to buy. Or like the Amish telling you which brand of car is more fun to drive. I could go on, but you get the idea already. How would he flipping know?
But, as I was saying, he doesn't. He was just telling us to stop buying the competition's product and start buying more of his. Without even having used either. Just because one makes him money and the other doesn't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Unless they give me some incentive (added bonus, extra trophies, seperate ending) this will be a kick in the face for all hardcore gamers.
Read the summary for cricket's sake. You can't save your progress if you turn on autopilot.
Is the autopilot in BZFlag, if you need to do a quick break you turn on autopilot and your tank goes merrily along and then you can turn it off and continue.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I honestly believe that this patent will be thrown out. If, for some odd reason, it gets passed, then it will merely be laughed at and/or abused. My brother is a prime example of someone who would BARELY use this type of "cheating"; he loves the challenge of finishing a game and doing it on his own. He says, and I quote, "The only reason I would use this feature is to [bypass using] YouTube videos so that I didn't have to use the Internet to help me solve my problems." He goes on to say "I wouldn't save the game if I used [this feature], because I would want to do it myself." That shows a TRUE gamer; not some person who would simply use it for cheating and bypassing the requirements.
Definitely out long before June '08, you can, with the push of a button, turn Autoplay on or off at any time during gameplay.
...never mind that it has no cut scenes or plot because it's just a DDR clone, but this feature sounds just like what Nintendo's patent describes.
Exosquad for the Sega Genesis worked almost EXACTLY in this fashion, but not from complete start to finish.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
A friend tried to get me into Ultima Online a while back. Once I installed the app, she directed me to an app that would auto-play my character to dig for gold and such, so that I didn't have to spend countless hours on the grind work, but that I could turn off to play when I wanted.
That lasted about two hours for me. I determined that a game that needs such an app to be fun has a highly flawed design.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
It's called Metal Gear Solid 4
Doesn't Mario Galaxy do this already. when I go to the toilet Mario starts scratching his arse and i don't have to push any buttons. Or does he go to sleep, mhh can't remember.
You don't, even console FPSes are abandoning single-system multiplayer by now.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
This is exactly what Space Channel 5 does... Hit a combination of keys on the controller to activate it and the game plays itself. You can switch in and out of the game.
My kids were amazed at my beat-memory skills as I flawlessly played this game through to the end before I showed them the trick.
Now sometimes they load it up and activate it just for amusement although they also like playing it too.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
So what video game do you choose to play when you have friends over that don't own sufficiently powerful laptop computers and copies of the same games that you play?
No, it really is more of a waste of time, because the game has a built in system of automation that it assumes 99% of people will be using, and the gameplay is engineered accordingly. It's like trying to beat GTA only making left turns. Yes, it can be done, but you're not doing anything but making your own life harder with no real added satisfaction.
Something that isn't an FPS?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Would masturbation be considered prior art???
"But when played this way, gamers would not be able to save their progress".
Wait, I'm confused. Most games nowadays take anwhere from 5-200 hours to complete. If you can't save your progress when you play with this feature, how is this at all useful? It becomes little more than a demo to show you the first bit of the game, something games had in 1980 (if you didn't start the game, most games used to go into demo loops which would show you what the game was like).
Exactly. This was done in 1984. All you need to do is enter Number Of Players = 0 and you're done! Actually, in 1985 I modified a Othello game that I typed in out of Compute! to play itself in order to learn the strategy to use to beat the game (Get the corners!). Can I claim prior art? 8^)
And I thought that Nintendo was all about GAMEPLAY :P What's next, a lineup of Pokemon, Animal Crossing and Mario hidden object games?
Surely a lack of ability to save doesn't help the casual gamer. Who's going to leave the game running all the time for the multiple hours from intro to outro?
Nintendo should work on consolidating its IP lineup by bringing back the good ones - Donkey Kong Country in particular not to mention some 2D Super Mario games for that old-school feel with next-gen perks - rather than focus on silly patents like this.
Anyway, casual gamers should be placed on suspended bricks and headbutted from underneath!
FPSes suck on a console, they just suck, the controls are terrible and ultimately very little can change that. A keyboard and mouse is a much better choice for that sort of gaming.
But how do you plan to fit four keyboards and four mice around a single TV in a social gaming scenario?
Easy. Remove the TV, put some tables in, get four monitors and computers plus associated bits and pieces, add a switch and frag to your hearts content.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
But how do you plan to fit four keyboards and four mice around a single TV in a social gaming scenario?
get four monitors and computers plus associated bits and pieces
Good luck getting budget approval for that. A lot of families can justify a $300 console + $600 32" monitor + $150 extra controllers + $50 each for 3 games, but not $1600 for four PCs including keyboards and mice + $800 for four monitors and sets of speakers + $160 each for 4-packs of 3 games. For now, I work around the problem by shying away from the M-rated shooters and putting on the Smash Bros.
Game Arts did this as far back as the Lunar games on Sega-CD, you could choose "Auto", and all characters would continue going until the end of the turn. The Shin Miegami series took this a step further with Persona 3 where the characters just kept going until told to do otherwise. Namco's "Tales of" series has multipul characters, in which any player can step in, at any time, and play as. When not activated, the characters just start playing themselves. I can theoretically setup all 4 characters to play on full auto, and just battle it out using whatever strategies I have set.
This is not new. Some multiplayer games even automatically take over when players are innactive.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.