Apple Patents Personalized Videogame Comic Books

Tom Goldman

Crying on the inside.
Aug 17, 2009
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Apple Patents Personalized Videogame Comic Books



After you beat a game like Mass Effect 2, Apple wants to send you a comic book that re-tells your unique videogame story.

Have you ever thought that the way you completed a game was so cool it was worthy of being in print? Apple thinks so too, with a recent patent filed by the company that will generate a book based on the recorded data from a videogame called "Automatically Generating a Book Describing a User's Videogame Performance."

The way it works is quite simple. A consumer plays a videogame and then requests a book to be made. Information recorded in the game is sent to a server, which generates "narrative data" and transcribes it into a book, e-book, or comic book. This could likely include pregenerated text and images, or screenshots that take the place of illustrations. The platforms mentioned for use with this technology are mobile phones, videogame consoles, handhelds, and personal computers.

This might not be all that useful for a game like Fallout 3 [http://www.amazon.com/New-Super-Mario-Bros-Nintendo-Wii/dp/B002BRZ9G0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1281645598&sr=8-1] where choice is a key mechanic it could create vastly different books for each person. The patent names Mass Effect specifically to point out how the technology would work, with each of the game's dialog choices referred to as one of the differences the system would record and then print. The resulting book would also feature the type of character that a player created with his/her specific looks, character class, etc.

This isn't anything that's going to revolutionize gaming but it is a clever thought. As personal choice becomes a larger part of many videogames, it might be cool to have a reminder of how we completed a game in the past. Even better, emergent gameplay could lead to emergent books. And you never know, with mod tools like Fallout 3's G.E.C.K. now prominent, we might someday be able to create our own books/comic books simply by playing through our own creations.

Source: Kotaku [http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=videogame&s2=apple&OS=videogame+AND+apple&RS=videogame+AND+apple]


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Gudrests

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Mar 29, 2010
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this sounds awsome....except...i will have read it before and alot of the books will be the same...now if you could also select key moments in gameplay to have in the story also...like when you pull the whole room of baddies and just barly manage to escape because you were PRO AS CAN BE...then that would be...well epic
 

zombie711

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Aug 17, 2009
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I want to see If I can use pong. It would go like this, "at first there was nothing then...... pong!....pong!.....pong!....pong!

best waste of tech ever
 

pmeier

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Apr 15, 2009
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While this sound pretty cool, I'm not so sure how this would work out practically.
The quality of the comics would be an issue with games like Mass Effect and Fallout because they would require different graphics depending on your characters appearance. And if they just use screenshots they still need quality control and look at all the screenshots to prevent them having a picture of the wall for when the camera acts up.
Not to mention that all these personalised comic books will be more or less the same as these games usually don't offer all that many different outcomes.
 

JediMB

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Oct 25, 2008
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One panel, Commander Shepard is in a heated conflict with an interplanetary drug lord, and finds out about his hidden base on another planet.

The next, he goes to strip mine a couple of planets just for funsies.
 

Jared

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Jul 14, 2009
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I dont think its a bad idea, and could be pretty cool, but, the question is...do they want to charge?!
 

T-Bone24

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Dec 29, 2008
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My Mass Effect comic book will involve ten pages of the same image of Shepard standing in front of someone whilst I make a sandwich. Gripping stuff.
 

Ekonk

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Apr 21, 2009
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This seems kinda dumb. How well would a comic book translate a game, what with 'kill 8 X' and the like.
 

Booze Zombie

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Dec 8, 2007
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Holy fuck, that could be awesome.

"And Commander Frilly-laces Sheppard shot up the place and saved (what was left) of the innocent civilians."
 

Deacon Cole

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Jan 10, 2009
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An idea like this is kind of useless so long as human beings still have that whosywhatsit thing.


Oh yeah. Memory!
 

Kajt

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Feb 20, 2009
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Interesting. I'd love a comic about my hundreds of hours of TF2.