You may have seen some rumblings doing the rounds about a patent that was discovered by the folks at Tech4Gamers, and it's a Microsoft patent that was first filed in 2024, but has only become publicly visibly over the past month.
It's titled "STATE MANAGEMENT FOR VIDEO GAME HELP SESSIONS", and the idea is Microsoft could use either a machine learning model (a subset of AI) or other players to help you when you're stuck in an Xbox game.
The patent suggests that the current forms of seeking assistance — such as watching online videos or going on online forums — are "rudimentary", and therefore this would help make things more efficient.
"Video game players sometimes seek help from other video game players to overcome in-game difficulties, often by consulting online forums or videos. However, while this type of help is widely available, it takes a great deal of effort for users to seek out the assistance they need to accomplish their goal. Furthermore, these techniques may take the video game players out of the gaming experience while they search for external help content."
"A “help session” is an experience that occurs to assist a video game player with a particular portion of a video game. For instance, a help session can include a tutorial, e.g., text, chat, or video-based. A help session can also include transferring control of a video game session to another game player that temporarily takes over control of a video game until the help session is completed. The other game player can be a human being or, in some cases, a machine learning model."
There are all sorts of explanations about how this could work in various scenarios, such as in adventure games and racing games, and there are even some images that indicate how it could look when someone took over your game:
One thing we really want you to keep in mind here is that the patent was filed in 2024, so that's obviously long before the announcement of Asha Sharma as Xbox boss last month. Patents are also filed all the time for all sorts of reasons, and there's never any guarantee they'll turn into anything concrete — this is just Microsoft exploring some ideas.
And for what it's worth, PlayStation has filed basically the same thing, with a story doing the rounds in January about an AI "ghost" that would help stuck players. We'll leave you with some coverage from Push Square on that down below.