Apple Wants Patent On Video Game-Based iBooks

theodp writes "Patently Apple reports that a new Apple patent application has surfaced describing an application that would record your personal journey through a video game and turn it into a custom comic or iBook when you're done playing. Imagine how thrilled little Billy's Mommy would have been if she only had the chance to read the story of her son's foray into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or see how he dealt with BioShock's Little Sisters."

WEIRD!!!!

[future assassin]

I was playing Need For Speed on my new 3DO machine the other day and when I finished a race I had the replay option which lets me view the whole race from several angles. I could then make a video and turn it into a personal video game comic.

I call prior art

[Zocalo]

Lucasart's "Grim Fandango" saved a transcript of your game in a marked up HTML format that was a script of your game back in 1998. It's only a tiny step from there to turn it into a comic (add screen captures from the game), screenplay (add stage directions) or an eBook (add narrative), so I'm not sure that Apple's application meets the sufficiently novel requirement of a patent. Oh, wait. It's the USPTO we're talking about, isn't it?

As an aside, given the brilliant humour in the game, its cult popularity and the movie making talents of LucasArts I was quite surprised, and more than a little disappointed that it didn't make it onto the big screen.

Will Wright

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

Genuinely surprised this isn't coming from Will Wright, this meta-gaming/user-content-generating stuff is right up his alley. I also thought The Sims already did something along these lines.

Re:Prior art

[pushing-robot]

Not to mention all the adventure games where the game generates some sort of narrative based on player-triggered events. I recently encountered these in Culpa Innata's diary and the new Monkey Island series's save game descriptions, but similar auto-generated "stories" have been in games for a long time.

And don't forget Dwarf Fortress; a rather audacious attempt to procedurally generate entire fantasy worlds complete with lore based in part on your actions. I can't do it justice with a few sentences, so here's someone else's description [giantbomb.com] of the feature:

Legends mode

Legends mode does not fit the criteria of a traditional game; indeed, you don't control anything in it at all. Instead, Legends mode serves as a log of sorts for the entire history of the world you generated, from year 1 to when it stopped generating. In it you can read up on various historical figures (great warriors, kings, or even common folk) as well as read an event log describing various wars, nation expansion, and megabeast (dragons, giants, etc.) activity. You can also view historical maps and watch as civilizations expand as cities are created and destroyed.

Though seen as boring to some, many feel the entire purpose and intent of Dwarf Fortress is to create an generated world full of interesting stories and historicial figures. Legends mode allows you to keep track of all, and serves as link between both Fortress and Adventurer mode. For instance, you may lose your fortress to a certain goblin warlord. By using Legends mode you'd be able to look up the warlord, find out his lineage, how many wars he had been in, and where he currently rules from, and from there you can take an adventurer to kill him out of revenge.

Re:WEIRD!!!!

[TheRaven64]

I used to have a text adventure called Journey (I think I still have it in the attic on 5.25" floppies) that generated a text file containing the story of your run through the game when you reached the end (or died).