Nintendo Patents Self-Playing Games, Developers React

Here's an interesting piece of business. Kotaku reported earlier today on a Nintendo patent filed in June 2008 under Shigeru Miyamoto's name for something called “Kind Code,” which appears to be a gameplay system that will effectively allow games to play themselves. You can check out the full patent application for yourself, but it's pretty technical and dense. The basic idea is that you could essentially flick an auto-pilot switch whenever the game got too hard or too tedious, sit back and watch the game progress from a passive perspective, then hop back in when it starts to look like fun again. Alternately, you could just skip to different parts of the game directly, DVD-chapter-style.

It's a pretty ambitious concept, and I suppose there's some merit to the idea of making games more accessible to people who don't play games. Kotaku got responses from a few different well-known developers about the potential of such potent hand-holding technology, though I think that Jonathan Blow sums up my perspective on the issue quite nicely.

The defining characteristic of a game is that you play it. If, in order for games to be accessible to a wider audience, we need to make it so that most people can skip over the playing it part, then what that really means is that our medium sucks.

Simply put, if people don't like playing your game, you're doing it wrong. I find this non-interactive approach really peculiar coming from Nintendo, since the whole hook behind the Wii is that it's interactive in a really novel way. The logic that you'd get people to play your games by making it so they don't have to play them seems profoundly circular. If people want to not-play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, they don't need to buy anything. Prince of Persia producer Ben Mattes also makes this really excellent point.

It makes sense to me in a purely linear game, but as soon as we get sand-box, or even remotely open ended, the number of variables would seem to invalidate the potential of this system.

He goes on to cite Fallout 3, which is a superb example of the direction that games seem to be headed. If any one idea defined the games of 2008, it's that, whether it be through realistic physics systems, moral choices, or user-generated content, the player has more of an impact on the world inside the games than ever. This “Kind Code” technology would've been a much more compelling piece of kit 10 or 15 years ago, when games were much more focused and linear. Though, I suppose you could argue that many of the games Nintendo makes today still retain that relatively narrow structure.

Keep in mind that all of this is based on a patent application that Nintendo hasn't publicly acknowledged, and it's hard to know if or how it would be applied. I have some grave concerns about the implications of making the interactivity of video games optional, though if the past four years have taught me anything, it's not to discount any of Nintendo's crazy, left-field ideas out of hand.