When game designer Peter Molyneux first unveiled the game Fable, he had lofty goals in mind. As the game was about you controlling a hero as a fable unfolds, with plenty of personal freedom mixed in, one of these goals was to record your deeds and travels in such a way that at the end, you could read about your exploits in the form of a book. That never happened, obviously. Leave it to Apple to pick up where he left off.
Apple recently filed a patent that many are finding odd, but we at Padvance find incredibly exciting. Now, as far as patents go, just because Apple has filed for it does not mean that they'll get it, and even if they get it, it doesn't mean they'll use it.
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The patent demonstrates a technique for tracking your play through a game and then producing a digital comic book to herald your activities. We can see this being beneficial in two different instances:
1. It creates a keepsake of a highly story-driven game that you would love to relive and share with friends. Perhaps you simply don't have the 40 hours it would take to replay the game just to relive the story.
2. A game offering a great amount of customization allows you to create, to a certain degree, your own story. This means that each play-through creates a different story, one that might be worthwhile recording for posterity.
The patent is quite lengthy and goes into a fair amount of detail about how this could be done. If game's are designed to take advantage of the system, information (be that screen shots, video, sound, dialog, or data) are recorded at set instances. This information is then fed into the comic book generator which is designed to output the information in a meaningful, coherent format.
Now, we find this exciting in its own right. It's certainly something that's never been done before, and so it's immediately open to failure. Gamers simply might not be interested in this. On the other hand, it could be a huge success, and with Apple holding the patent, they could stand to both make a lot of money and generate renewed interest among developers in developing games for their platforms so as to utilize the service.
Cinematic games like Mass Effect could easily be translated into a comic book format.
As far as the iPad is concerned, it this not the perfect platform for such a thing? With the iPad, we already have a device that displays comics beautifully. If these comics are our own custom creation, the excitement level shoots way up.
Whether or not this would be offered as a free service, something ordered through Apple, or something that Apple would simply take a cut from, we don't know. We don't even know if it will ever actually exist. What we do know is that it's something we hope Apple is willing to try.
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