I think you sorta have to read the patent that Nintendo was granted to understand the whole thing, but as a generality broad patents preemptively constrain possibility and so I oppose them. Also, the people who seem to grant patents don’t seem to know anything about anything; they’re like newly hatched chicks for whom all the world constitutes wonder and novelty. The early Internet was full of stuff where people were like, “Yeah, I came up with the idea of information itself” which people had to defend themselves from. I want to say that it’s like a battlefield from a parallel dimension, except in a very real way it is a higher dimension, because it determines what we can do down here.
There are actually a couple different patents. I’d read interpretations of what it is in a couple places, and one version of it would even have something like Marvel vs. Capcom be an infringing use in every particular. I ended up at Reddit, as one must, where an indie dev tried to fully parse it but still – there’s a discussion happening there, too. There sorta has to be. Eurogamer talked to a bunch of people who ply their trade on this particular battlefield, and none of them think it’s open and shut – outside of the terror it might strike in an erstwhile competitor.
(CW)TB out.
