Patents in the gaming world are often used to protect ideas and mechanics that have never been seen before. Sometimes they're just to protect a name like Assassin's Creed or Apex Legends and other times they're to allow companies to take advantage of ideas they think they can capitalise on in the long run. EA, for example, has just filed a patent that allows players to control games with voice commands through their phones.
As reported by GameRant, on August 3 2021 EA received a patent for a "voice-controlled companion application" that would assist gamers in using their voices to directly interact with games. The patent seems to imply that if players are away from the console or software they want to interact with, an app on their phone would allow them to make changes to their game from a different location.
Officially titled "Interactive voice-controlled companion application for a video game", the patented tech is primarily designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible. That means that EA is looking to make sure that players can keep engaging with their games when they're not sat in front of their consoles or computers.
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The patent says: "The longer a user is engaged with the software, the more likely that the software will be successful. The relationship between the length of engagement of the user and the success of the software is particularly true with respect to video games. The longer a user plays a particular video game, the more likely that the user enjoys the game and thus, the more likely the user will continue to play the game."
The patent seems to protect a system that would allow gamers to keep altering a game experience, such as cosmetics and player attributes, from an app on their phone while away from the actual game. Included in this app would be voice commands that mean that players could just say what they wanted to change or do to their phones and the software would take care of the rest. It's not clear if EA has actual plans to implement this tech in an app, or if it's just protecting it in case they have use for it down the line.
Patents in the gaming world have caused quite a lot of upset in the past. You may remember that the nemesis system from Warner Bros Middle-Earth: Shows of Mordor was patented so no one could use the same idea in other games until 2035. The game used a mechanic wherein if the player was killed by an enemy, then that was sort of a canonical death and that enemy became stronger and more difficult to defeat. Though Warner Bros tried to patent this back in 2015, it only came into place earlier this year because of how many times it was asked to revise the paperwork. These sorts of patents raise a lot of questions about what should and should not be protected in games.
Featured Image Credit: EA