Handheld Game Console Proximity Sound Feedback
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing multiplayer games often favor skilled players, leading to uninteresting experiences for others, and lack mechanisms to enhance gameplay excitement when searching for hidden items.
Innovation Solution
A game system that uses sound notifications to indicate a player's proximity to a hidden item, with varying sounds based on distance, creating a sense of competition and excitement among players, while maintaining mystery about who will find the item first.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If skilled players are given advantage in multiplayer games, then their performance is improved, but other players become disengaged due to performance gaps
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements sound feedback that provides real-time information about proximity to hidden items. This feedback mechanism levels the playing field by giving all players, regardless of skill level, actionable information about their progress in finding items, thereby maintaining engagement while preserving performance differences through strategic decision-making about item acquisition
2Loss of information
If hidden items are not displayed on screen, then mystery and exploration are enhanced, but players cannot track their progress toward finding items
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces sound notifications as an intermediary that conveys proximity information without revealing the actual item location. This mediator allows players to track their progress indirectly through audio cues while preserving the visual mystery of hidden item positions, effectively solving both the visibility and efficiency concerns
3Measurement precision
If sound notifications are made distinctive for each player, then individual progress is clearly communicated, but it becomes too easy to identify who is closest to items
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by using a common sound type for all players but varying the spatial characteristics (direction and distance) of the sound based on each player's local position relative to hidden items. This approach provides precise progress indication through spatial audio cues while avoiding the need for complex player-specific sound designs that would reveal identity
Data Source
AI summary
A game system includes, for example, a game console and a plurality of hand-held game apparatuses functioning as an operating means. In the game system, a game for causing a plurality of player characters simultaneously displayed to find a hidden item in a game field is performed. Then, when a distance between a non-displayed item hidden, which is an object to be found, and the player character comes within the range of the predetermined distance, a notification sound that varies depending on the distance, for example, is output from a speaker of the hand-held game apparatus that operates the player character.