Tutorials might well be the bane of the video game industry’s existence. Teaching a player how to do something is surprisingly difficult to do. Even if a developer crafts an educational and entertaining tutorial, there’s no telling whether the player will find it, try it, or pay enough attention to learn from it. When was the last time you actually used the PlayStation 5’s built-in Game Help feature? Exactly. Perhaps this is why Sony has been exploring more ways to get players on the same page, this time with AI.
As spotted by Boing Boing, there’s a Sony patent dating back to April that seems to have gone under the radar despite its curious premise. In it, Sony proposes the idea of “ghost assistance” where the game session connects to an artificial intelligence engine. That engine generates what Sony calls a “ghost character” who will basically show the player what needs to be done in that specific portion of the game.
“The interactive actions by the ghost character are configured to progress the ghost character along an interactive path of the game,” the patent reads. Based on phrasing, it seems that players will need to have a specific mode turned on in order for any of this to trigger, which theoretically means that you can opt out of seeing random ghosts telling you what to do.
Players will also be able to control how much help the ghost AI actually provides. The AI might guide the player with an overlay of what needs to be done, or it could give the player examples of the specific button inputs needed to progress through the game. The ghost can hold an interactive conversation with the player using natural language, like you might when speaking to AI like Grok. And of course, the ghost can simply do whatever you need for you.
Now, it’s worth keeping a few things in mind here. Though Sony repeatedly uses the word “AI,” this does not necessarily mean that the feature will be similar to the controversial technology powering things like ChatGPT. But the wording of the patent certainly sounds like it. Sony specifies that the AI will be trained “from a plurality of training footage sources” that it will use to analyze live gameplay so it can offer the player contextual help. That footage can be based on previous playthroughs of the game generated by other users, both “in-network” and “out-of-network,” as well as anything online that it might deem helpful, like social media posts or website descriptions. The patent also specifies that the game engine could be “distributed among a plurality of processing entities, each of which may reside on different server units of a data center.”
Another aspect that makes this sound like our more modern understanding of AI is that Sony says the ghost can look like basically anything. “The ghost character can be represented as a character from a movie, a character figure from another game, or a user-generated character,” the patent reads. Later on, the patent specifies that the AI model can “continuously” learn from game scenarios posed by other sources as the user makes progress.
In case you’re having trouble visualizing how this might work, Sony helpfully provides an example in the patent:
By way of example, the ghost character can be an animated representation of all-knowing Yoda from Star Wars. By way of example, Yoda can provide not just interactive moves to show how to play specific scenarios of the game, but can also provide verbal communication to the player character 109, which is listened to by the player 107. The ghost assistance therefore can be a combination of moves and actions an interactive action performed by the ghost character or can be in the form of verbal or gestures provided that can be viewable by the player 107 controlling player character 109 in the game scene during a game session. If the verbal gesture is provided by the animated character Yoda, the visual representation of Yoda can be rendered in the form of Yoda speaking back to the character controlled by the player.
The patent also poses the possibility of having the AI technology track the gaze of the user, or use a camera to capture images of the IRL space the player occupies. If that sounds like a security nightmare, well, there’s still reason to hold some hope. A patent does not guarantee that the company in question will actually do whatever is described in the document. Patents tend to describe a myriad of possibilities that may not bear out in the end product. The 2025 patent is also the latest iteration of a patent Sony filed back in 2023. If something like the AI ghost ever does come to life, it may not be until we get a PlayStation 6. And based on what’s happening with graphics cards and memory chips right now, it’s increasingly looking like new consoles won’t be a reality anytime soon.
All the same, it’s a little harrowing to think someone might use the resource equivalent of burning down a forest just to see Mr. Beast beat Cuphead or something.
