Microsoft Xbox Patent Outlines AI Game Playing: No Need to Check Walkthroughs When Stuck, Can Seamlessly Take Over Your Controller

IT House, March 4 — Tech media NeoWin published a blog post yesterday (March 3) about a new technology patent approved by Microsoft. The future cloud-based AI assistance technology could help gamers defeat bosses and clear games.

In traditional gaming experiences, players often need to pause and leave the game when facing difficult challenges, then browse forums for text guides or watch video tutorials.

To solve this problem, Microsoft proposed a “proxy play” mechanism: allowing human or AI assistants, pre-approved by the system, to join the current game session upon receiving player commands and temporarily take over gameplay.

In specific scenarios, the system will prompt players via a pop-up whether they want the assistant to take control. According to the blog post, here are some examples:

When a player is struggling to find a rare gem in an RPG, the assistant can take control, communicate with the player via voice or text, and demonstrate the process of obtaining the gem;

In a racing game, the assistant can directly complete extremely difficult tracks for the player. Once the challenge is overcome, control is seamlessly returned to the player.

To ensure safety and fairness, Microsoft has also filed four supporting patents to improve the ecosystem:

First, the system will match players with assistants of similar age to avoid exposure to inappropriate content;

Second, it will strictly track game achievements, accurately recording whether achievements are unlocked by the player or the assistant;

At the same time, input filtering mechanisms are in place to automatically block any illegal operations performed by the assistant;

Finally, Microsoft is actively training machine learning models to enable AI to perfectly handle these assistance tasks in the future.