Apple Patent Could Transform Video Games Into Comics

Recap pages are a pretty standard feature in serialized superhero comics, but gaming save points don't always review a gamer's progress in a meaningful way. A recently filed patent by Apple could change all that, however, by possibly giving players the power to log their game time sequential art style.

The official patent filing is pretty intense, but essentially points out how great it would be to generate an electronic document that replicates the experience of playing a video game like "Mass Effect" (note that the patent basically applies to gamedom as a whole -- not just Apple products) in an attractive and quickly-digestible way. It's kind of like being able to make your own custom comic book adaptation of a favorite game without all that pesky writing or illustrating.

Systems and methods are provided that record data in a videogame, such as a user's character and performance in the videogame, and generate a book, e-book, or comic book based on the recorded data. A narrative data structure generated from the recorded data may include pregenerated text and images, and may provide for insertion of the recorded data into the narrative data structure. The recorded data may be converted into natural-language text for insertion into the narrative data structure. In some embodiments, the system may record screenshots of the videogame and insert the screenshots into the narrative data structure as illustrations. The narrative data structure may be provided to a location for printing as a book or other publication or may be electronically formatted and provided as an e-book.

Check out the filing's visual aides below.

[Via MTV Multiplayer]