Fuck software patents.
As a teen, I was into law and computers, so I wanted to be a software patent attorney. Partway through my CS program, I did some FOSS work and realized just how awful software patents can be.
I don’t understand how anyone can actually make software patents. What kind of person can get far enough into a software career and not realize how utterly evil they are?
Length alone makes them obscene. The classic example in games is minigames during a load screen - which happened in exactly one game, and then belonged to Namco until after we stopped caring about load screens. They strangled an entire subgenre. The feature was not allowed to exist, in an industry built from collective incremental experimentation.
Twenty years is an eternity in computing.
Twenty years ago, shaders weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, video cards weren’t a thing.
Twenty years earlier, home computers weren’t a thing.
The entire RPG genre emerged from dork-ass teenagers wasting time on mainframes between 1973 and 1976. If the concepts involved had been patented and locked away, there would not be games with first-person perspective, overhead maps, generated dungeons, turn-based combat, or inventory, until the Nintendo 64.
Maybe. Or maybe we’d have less selection but more approaches to solve the same problem. That’s not great because it means games would be less approachable since they can’t borrow what works well.
I think software patents in general are stupid. The implementation is often obvious when looking at the end product, so the whole point of a patent (socialize information) isn’t relevant. The work to build it initially also isn’t particularly large for most things, certainly not to the level of pharmaceuticals. So the only purpose of a software patent is to block competition, there’s little if any social benefit to granting the patent.
Other approaches would be similarly clamped-down. We’d quickly run out of ways to make things happen on a screen in response to pushing buttons.
The very concept of a video game console might still be owned by Fairchild.
“we had this idea, no idea if it’s possible, we may not make it, but fuck anyone else who tries to do this”
The patent is a lot less interesting than it sounds initially.
It instantly made me think of the original Borderlands and how my friends and I would try to see how long we could “bounce” on each others heads, because if you jump on top of another character, you’ll just keep “bouncing” off of their head.
It’s tricky to keep landing on them, even if they’re not moving!
I kind of figured they meant that something dumb like that could be turned into an actual mini-game within a game, allowing you keep score.
No, the patent is way fucking dumber, sounds like more stupid AI bullshit, and basically focused on dumb streamer shit.
Seems like a video game version of playing H-O-R-S-E in basketball: you need to make it from behind the hoop, with your eyes closed, and while hopping on one foot…
Isn’t this just user-created achievements?
Sony patents a lot of fancy undoable things.
