The technology could also allow live streams to influence the games you’re playing.
It’s a very strange patent that Activision has just filed in the United States. Titled ” Systems and methods for dynamically changing video game content based on non-video game content being viewed simultaneously by a user », this invention would aim to analyze the viewing habits of players in order to suggest new games, but also to influence their own current game. Explanations.
Activision wants streaming to influence your games
The technology imagined by the publisher concerns a very specific use of video games: when the user plays while watching a live program, whether on television or even on Twitch. Thus, events occurring in the program viewed could modify the game in progress:
An example of interaction could be the broadcast of the NBA Finals between the Lakers and the Celtics. If a particular player blocks or the team scores a three-pointer, the user who uses that blocking player or plays on the scoring team in the video game may receive, through the game server, an increase in blocking statistics of the user’s player for a predefined period or the three-point shooting accuracy of the user’s players for a predefined period.
Source: Activision
The real world could therefore impact the game world in real time. This would also concern broadcasts of e-sports matches if the player is playing the same game on their PC or console:
In another example, the game server may cause an event to occur in the user’s first-person shooter (FPS) game when the user’s local FPS team wins a match in an esports stream that the user is watching.
Generate video games on the fly
And Activision’s idea goes even further since it talks about generating games on the fly, suggested in a window superimposed on the program that the user is currently watching. The notification will take the form of an advertisement (the opposite would have surprised us) which must be clicked on to launch the game.
This is not the first time that the publisher wants to make spectators active: another patent filed last October spoke of a technology to let viewers viewers of a live broadcast influence the game itself. We are thinking here of what it is already possible to do with a game like Baldur’s Gate III on Twitch, but on a different scale.
As always, the feasibility of the technologies imagined in this type of patent is not explained. How could a television program influence a game played on another machine? How will these video games be “generated” on the fly? So many questions that may never be answered.