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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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?