Here's an interesting piece of business. Kotaku reported earlier today on a Nintendo patent filed in June 2008 under Shigeru Miyamoto's name for something called “Kind Code,” which appears to be a gameplay system that will effectively allow games to play themselves. You can check out the full patent application for yourself, but it's pretty technical and dense. The basic idea is that you could essentially flick an auto-pilot switch whenever the game got too hard or too tedious, sit back and watch the game progress from a passive perspective, then hop back in when it starts to look like fun again. Alternately, you could just skip to different parts of the game directly, DVD-chapter-style.
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