Sony’s New Patent Will Let Them Know If You Ragequit

Sony has been in a patent-producing frenzy over the past few months. Everything from rewind buttons to real-time adjustments to game difficulty and a second screen offering in-game suggestions. Now Sony wants to monitor players’ environments and detect outbursts or frantic button mashing. 

As spotted by Tech4Gamers. Sony recently secured a patent that would allow them to monitor players’ emotive states and interactions with their consoles. This patent is titled “Method for location-based player feedback to improve games”. This tech seemingly seeks to optimize the feedback loop between players and developers. It will accomplish this by monitoring how players interact with their games. 

Sony mentions integrating a neural network. It would be trained to detect when a player is having issues with a specific level or area in a game. The network will then attempt to determine whether or not the issues arise as a result of skill, network or hardware and then attempt to address them directly. This can take many forms from adjusting the in-game difficulty to slowing down the enemy’s movements when latency is detected. The network can also offer area-specific or game-specific advice.

Sony is also looking to gather real-time feedback on the player’s emotional state. This will either be accomplished through sensors and trackers or other tools.  Sony states that it may collect the following information: 

“user demographic information, such as age, gender, location, and other relevant data, (8) social features, such as how player interact each other with in-game chat and friend invites, (9) in-game economy, such as tracking patterns of purchases and/or sales of virtual items, and (10) progression, such as tracking player achievements and/or trophies and/or pace of progress.”

“In some implementations, the collection module 110 in the system 100 may collect unstructured gameplay data, such as video image data, game audio data, controller input data, group chat data, and the like. It may be useful to provide structure to such data to facilitate processing by the pattern recognition module 120, localization module 130, and feedback module 140.”

While Sony claims this information will be gathered in an attempt to make gaming more accessible… It’s not ideal that a massive company should have such sensitive information. Nor should they possess the ability to monitor your movements, reactions, conversations and emotions. That sort of information should be considered private. Sony has previously been hacked in 2011 and 2014. Should malicious actors have access to this sort of sensitive information? This technology hasn’t been implemented yet. It may never be implemented but it’s worth being aware of and keeping up to date on. 

If you’d like to read up on some of the other recent patents click here. If you’d like to read the full notes on this latest patent click here.