Activision has filed a new patent for an invention that seeks to use players' GPS coordinates to create new game worlds. According to the recently published patent by Activision, this would allow the company to procedurally generate aspects of a game world, such as puzzles and non-playable character behaviors, based on the players' location information.
Activision filed the patent on May 25, 2023. In its documentation, the company believes that "specifying the extensive details of a game world, their occurrence, and their variations may be a laborious task." This issue would also be impacted by video game procedural generation limitations that would hamper the ability of Activision's developers to deliver new content since the randomly generated nature of procedurally generated worlds is currently limited to slight layout changes.
Activision's invention in this patent uses players' GPS information to create new aspects of a game world through procedural generation to help solve this issue. However, the patent also states that this information can also affect NPC behavior and how the levels are structured in their iterations. This information would also adapt to changes to the players' location, such as when a player moves from one place to another through a smartphone, allowing for a more adaptable system that would aid procedurally generated video game worlds to provide an experience tailored to the players.
The patent also states that the GPS information could be used to determine things such as whether a certain gameplay mode would be available to play, puzzles that are tailored to the player's current location based on the specific latitude and longitude coordinate values, alongside several other aspects that would benefit procedurally generated experiences. We've seen this kind of design before as a patent from Activision filed a few years ago was made to tailor to Activision's interest in Augmented Reality.
The flow chart above explains the process behind Activision's invention that would use GPS information to obtain a seed number that would generate aspects of a game world for gameplay purposes. The above drawings also illustrate how this process would adapt to the player's current location, latitude, and longitude data. Changing the location would generate a different seed number, providing a different experience. While the device shown in most illustrations is a smartphone, Activision stated that the device could be any computing device that supports GPS information.
This might be a bit of an issue for some players as this patent will inevitably bring up some privacy concerns, as providing location data to Activision would be against the best interests of some players. Of course, a patent is just an idea that could be forgotten about soon. Let's not forget that there have been some crazy patent filings that were never acted upon over the years, such as an EA patent to use music to reflect player emotions.