Patent applications let people dream big. Someone out there’s got a killer idea for the Litter Box of the Future or fart-proof underwear. There may be hundreds of hurdles to cross before any such thing gets made, but a patent lets them plant a flag in the land of unclaimed ideaspace.
With video games, the patents we hear about concern themselves mostly with technology and features. Applications for controller, networking and display components get filed long before hardware gets manufactured. Some of that stuff never comes to pass and even for tech giants like Apple or Sony, patents sometimes speak more to aspiration than anything actually executable.
Neverheless, Dr Elliot McGucken’s application for a “System And Method For Creating Exalted Video Games and Virtual Realities Wherein Ideas Have Consequences” might be the boldest, craziest and yes, scariest game patent dream ever.
McGucken’s personal website paints him to be a multidisciplinary renaissance man whose work binds together hard science, classic literature and cutting-edge technology. Paging through the application’s flowcharts gives you a taste of the philosophy at work here, but it’s only by digging through the mounds of text that you’ll encounter anti-establishment vocabulary words like fiatocracy. The patent aims to put McGucken’s hero’s journey mythology ideas into a video game where the fictional construct responds to your actions. Not that weird, you say?
Well, McGucken’s would-be game would have players to killing Communist vampires and quoting Scripture, Homer or the Constitution to save the world from serfdom. The game’s enemies get listed as a hybrid of Communist, the Matrix, Sauron and Scottish nobles. Read the whole thing here.
In short, someone make this game happen. Please.
[Thanks, tipster Jeremy]
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