Sony's latest patent imagines a future where your PlayStation... plays your games for you?

A recently published patent from Sony has revealed that the company is considering introducing a method to let your games play themselves.

Have you ever thought to yourself, "wow, I sure do wish that my game would just play itself so I can get this annoying grinding out the way and, I dunno, do my taxes or something else adults do in the meantime"? Well, first of all, maybe consider playing a different game, but if you're determined to stick with it, I have some (potentially) good news for you. As spotted by Exputer, Sony published one of its patents earlier this month, which apparently features a "method and system for auto-playing portions of a video game."

According to the patent's description, "the auto-play mode uses data from the user play model to automatically play the AGC for the user using a gameplay style that simulates a gameplay style of the user." It goes on to explain that "when gameplay of the AGC in auto-play mode is complete, a resume notification is presented to the display screen of the user device used by the user during the gameplay. The resume notification provides the user with an option to discontinue use of the auto-play mode and resume gameplay in active play mode."

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't personally like the idea of spending $70 on a game only to have it be played for me in quite a literal sense, but hey, maybe it would mean I'd finally get through Persona 5. A later description in the patent explains that the feature would utilise AI and training models based on a player's previous gaming sessions to create an AI player character that would play pretty much as you do for those grindy portions.

Whether this feature gets introduced or not, it seems like it will have a broad use case, as the patent suggests it could be used for games with repetitive tasks, or simply when a player just isn't interested in playing a particular quest. A lot of these kinds of patents never actually end up being used, though, like this other patent from Sony that suggests you could turn a banana (or anything else) into a controller.