It seems EA has been on a bit of a patent spree. No sooner do we get this lovely patent about making a controller that automatically configures itself to suit a player's skill (such as adjusting its sensitivity on the fly "to improve the performance of the user"), than we get a second patent for something that could be equally useful for video game development.
WIPO patent number US11478713 (courtesy of Gamesual) is for something called "automated detection of emergent behaviors in interactive agents of an interactive environment." That's a fancy name for what is essentially an artificial intelligence that "utilizes a trained machine-learning-based clustering algorithm to group users together based on similarities in behavior."
To explain it slightly more simply than the patent's scientific language, the AI would notice player behaviors and categorize them, making it easy to determine what behaviors are most common in a game and also how many players are performing those behaviors. This is extremely useful in a game as it allows you "to treat users differently based on their in-game behavior and to adapt in near real-time to changes in their behavior."
Let's run through a few examples. Say you're playing an RPG like Skyrim and you walk up to an NPC. If the AI detects you've mostly been wielding a sword for the entire game, it'll determine you have a reputation for being a swordsman and the NPC will address you as such. Or if you've had a habit of killing innocent people, that NPC might instead decide to run away rather than have a conversation with you.
But it goes way beyond making an RPG more immersive. This patent could also detect the "malicious activity" of players "exploiting the environment." For example, if the player community discovers a new glitch that breaks a competitive multiplayer game, the AI could quickly determine what that glitch is based on the repeated behavior of all the players that are taking advantage of the new glitch, making it both easier to fix the glitch and easier to punish the players exploiting that glitch.
Bots are another thorny problem that this patent could solve. The AI could detect player accounts that are gold farming or make suspiciously fast transactions on in-game storefronts to detect accounts that are actually bots.
The applications for this AI are truly endless and would be a game changer were it to be implemented in upcoming games. It could very well already be in upcoming EA games, although there hasn’t been any official announcement from EA one way or the other.