The Problem With Gaming Patents

Gamasutra has an article with some interesting things to say about the issue of patents and video games, a topic of particular interest given the whole Sony/Immersion flap. Seems that patents in general have gotten a wee bit out of hand; it took 46 years to reach 10,000 US patents, a figure that is now duplicated every three weeks. What that boils down to, says author David Sirlin, is a whole lotta crap is getting patented when it really shouldn't be, including that rumble feature everyone's fighting about. Here's an excerpt:

One belief is that patents such as Sega’s ‘138 and Namco’s ‘632 are so laughable that they would never stand up in court. Well, they are laughable and I don’t see how they could stand up in court because they blatantly fail the test of “non-obvious to a person of average skill working in the field at the time.”

But the power of the patent is the power to threaten a doomsday not unlike nuclear warfare. Defending against even the craziest patent lawsuit is more than a $1 million endeavor (or at least that’s what patent lawyers tell me). Hardly anyone can afford to take this gamble, and anyone who does has a chance of losing BIG—a lot bigger than just the $1 million ante required to sit down at the legal poker table.

He makes an interesting (and well-researched) case that left me amazed at how relatively simple it is to patent a nebulous concept. So I'm thinking I'm going to patent the "virtual scenario in which a character's posterior causes the destruction of an object or character when applied with downward vertical force." In other words, I'm slappin' a patent on the butt bounce. Nintendo will owe me millions.

The Trouble With Patents [Gamasutra]