Thanks for the clarification, Bill. I can definitely see something like being useful. I eventually gave up on Final Fantasy IV for my DS; just the raw tedium of all of those random encounters was just too much for me. I would have loved to be able to automatically play through that and just pick it back up when things got interesting again. It'd be nice if the player could make some basic decisions about the autopilot, though, perhaps giving it some goals or setting some basic priorities.

I can think of lots of other places where this would be useful. Imagine a flight sim--landing and taking off are so hard, but flying is usually pretty easy. Just let the computer get you off the ground, and then you can fly around for awhile and then get the pleasure of watching an expert landing. Kinda like being a co-pilot.

Or imagine you get hopelessly stuck in an adventure game. Instead of just going for hints or consulting a walkthrough, you could turn on the autopilot to see what it's doing. As soon as you see what you're supposed to be doing, you could turn it off and continue on. I just see so many good applications for this.