As reported by All About AI, in 2025 Sony was granted a patent for an AI-generated ghost player that can help you out when you’re stuck. (Sony applied for the patent in 2023; these things take time.) The patent proposes an in-game interface that accepts “natural language queries” to identify which bit of the game you’re stuck on, and then can either show you how to overcome the obstacle or take over and do it for you. I guess via possession?
The “ghost character” who provides “ghost assistance” will be based on footage of other players, presumably scraped from YouTube by AI. There’s already a Game Help feature on Playstation 5 that can bring up relevant videos when you’re stuck, and this seems like a less jarring implementation of that.
As far as throwing AI at videogames goes, it sounds pretty inoffensive to me. It’s not costing anyone their job or, you know, devaluing the connection between artist and audience. If it means there’s one less reason to splatter yellow paint telling us where to go all over videogames, this seems like a good thing.
Of course, that’s not how gamers have responded. BlueSky and the like are full of people furious at the idea of videogames playing themselves when you should be struggling to get through every boss fight uphill both ways like we did when men still had hair on their chests in the good old days.
Well, I remember the good old days, and what I remember is that we knew all Doom’s cheats by heart and passed around walkthroughs from magazines so we could finish the Discworld videogame. If I could press a button and have an AI ghost skip me through the obligatory terrible stealth bits in the next Sony cinemaslop action-adventure, I’d bloody well take it.
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