In an age where Kinect and PlayStation Eye/Move are encouraging less traditional interaction with video game consoles and cameras are a mainstay in virtual everything, let alone most mobile devices, one man at Disney Interactive sees video game systems moving even further from the path of the familiar and letting the console games make their own decisions based on — you guessed it — physical appearance.
Both ‘System and method for number of players determined using facial recognition’ (US Patent Application 20120214585) and ‘Gender and age based gameplay through face perception’ (US Patent Application 20120214584) list Phillippe Paquet as the sole inventor and offer to leverage existing technology in interesting ways.
While a fascinating prospect, this would encourage locking players into stereotypical gender roles which could be a problem — assuming the gender of the player is 100% accurate. Even the example of using age to determine difficulty is questionable since skillsets — particularly when it comes to video games — are very much subjective to the individual rather than the number of growth rings inside their bodies.
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