Sony recently filed a patent for a new system to monitor and “to prevent negative emotions” in players. The future is now.
Raging is a natural part of playing video games, everyone knows that. And everyone probably has a fair share of controllers that they wrecked. But, that’s obviously not healthy, neither for your mental nor for your controllers. It looks like Sony will try to do something about that.
Sony Wants To Moderate Your Emotions
The PlayStation-maker has recently filed a patent for a new system, which can monitor and moderate players’ emotions during their gaming sessions. That’s pretty wild! The patent promises a system that can “modify the presentation of messages in accordance with the moderation action specified by the player's emotional profile.”What exactly that means does not become completely clear from the patent. It sounds like the system will set up an emotional profile, which can be modified by the user. Once certain paramaters of this profile are triggered, like excessive swearing or increasingly louder shouting, the system will do its thing.
What that thing is, is probably the most Minority Report-esque part of this. According to the patent, the user’s emotionally driven message will be altered by the system. The patent speaks of written or verbal messages here, which is… weird? So if a teen shouts racist shit in CoD voice chat, will the PlayStation 5 be able to detect that and change what’s being said? That’s what that sounds like, and that would be really weird!
It’s so far just a patent, and companies like Sony file tons of those every day. So it’s not clear yet whether this will actually be implemented into PlayStations in the future. It would definitely be spooky! And potentially quite good at fighting toxicity.