Tutorials can become the existential bane of the video game industry. Teaching players how to do something can be surprisingly difficult. Even if the developer creates something educational, and It's an interesting tutorial, but I'm not sure if players will pay enough attention to find it, try it, or learn from it. When was the last time you actually used the PlayStation 5's built-in game help feature? That's right. Perhaps this is why Sony has been exploring further ways to get players on the same page, this time using AI.
As Boing Boing discovered, there's a Sony patent dating back to April that, despite its interesting premise, doesn't seem to be well known. In it, Sony proposes the idea of ”ghost assistance,” where game sessions are connected to an artificial intelligence engine. The engine generates what Sony calls “ghost characters” that essentially show players what they need to do in certain parts of the game.
“The interactive action by the ghost character is configured to advance the ghost character along an interactive path of the game,” the patent states. According to the wording, it appears that players will need to turn on a certain mode to trigger this. In theory, this means you can opt out of seeing random ghosts telling you what to do.
Players can also control how much assistance the Ghost AI actually provides. The AI may guide the player by overlaying what needs to be done, or provide the player with examples of specific button inputs needed to progress through the game. Ghosts can have interactive conversations with players using natural language, similar to how they talk to AIs like Grok. And of course ghosts can do whatever you need for you.
Well, it's worth remembering a few things here. Although Sony uses the word “AI” repeatedly, this doesn't necessarily mean its functionality is similar to the controversial technology that powers the likes of ChatGPT. But the patent language certainly sounds like it. Sony specifies that the AI will be trained from “multiple training footage sources” used to analyze live gameplay and can provide situational help to players. That footage may be based on previous playthroughs of the game generated by other users, both “in-network” and “out-of-network.” It can also be based on anything online that you find useful, such as social media posts or website descriptions. The patent also specifies that the game engine may be “distributed across multiple processing entities, with each processing entity residing on a different server unit in a data center.”
Another aspect that makes this sound like our more modern understanding of AI is that Sony says that ghosts can basically resemble anything. “A ghost character can be represented as a character from a movie, a character figure from another game, or a user-created character,” the patent states. The patent then specified that the AI model could “continuously” learn from game scenarios presented by other sources as the user progressed.
If you're having trouble understanding visually how this works, Sony provides a helpful example in their patent.
As an example, the ghost character may be an animated representation of the omniscient Yoda from Star Wars. As an example, Yoda may provide interactive movements to the player character 109 that the player 107 hears as well as provide interactive movements to indicate how to play a particular scenario of the game. Thus, ghost assistance can be a combination of movements and actions, interactive actions performed by a ghost character, or it can be in the form of verbal or gestural expressions that can be seen by the player 107 controlling the player character 109 in a game scene during a game session. If the verbal gesture is provided by the animated character Yoda, a visual representation of Yoda may be rendered in the form of Yoda speaking to the player-controlled character.
The patent also hints at the possibility of AI technology tracking a user's gaze and the use of cameras to capture images of the IRL space occupied by players. Even if it sounds like a security nightmare, there's still reason to have hope. A patent does not guarantee that the company in question will actually do what the document says. Patents tend to describe a myriad of possibilities that may not be realized in the final product. This 2025 patent is also the latest version of a patent filed by Sony in 2023. If something like AI ghosts ever becomes a reality, it may not happen until the PlayStation 6 arrives. And based on what's currently happening with graphics cards and memory chips, there's a growing belief that new gaming consoles won't become a reality any time soon.
Still, it's a little tragic to think that someone might spend the equivalent of burning down a forest just to watch Mr. Beast defeat him. cup head Or so.
