I’m really scratching the surface here, but I thought I would post a presentation I did for my musicology class the other day about the game Guitar Hero.
Video game music is evolving to the point where even non-musicians can get immersed in the music. The idea that music is getting into the hands of more and more people through games is incredible. The physical gestures of a live music performance with previously recorded sound is often dubbed a “Schizophonic Performance.” Combining the words “Schizo,” which is commonly referred to as “Schizophrenia,” or a loss of contact with the outside environment, and “Phonic,” sound.
A level of coordination is needed in order to play a game like this. The player feels the need to continue to succeed so that the song continues. The game inspires the capacity to inspire the feeling of making music. If one messes up, it is notated as some sort of cacophonous sound, so the incentive is there to do well. The song doesn’t end if a note or even two is missed, but if one keeps consistently missing notes, the song ends. This is an incredibly important psychological effects of the game. It is actually a good lesson: it rewards good play and makes people want to continue to do better than before. That can really be applicable to anything we do!
This is a performance. However, there is the issue of authenticity of the performance. “Perform the feat on a real instrument.” Players are required to “decode” what they see on the screen and transfer that to their physical coordination with the instrument. The buttons must be pressed at the right time, and one must have the cognitive capacity to do so.
In fact, one often starts to appreciate the music more, because the individual parts are highlighted in the game and allows a listener to pick out the nuances and is able to appreciate the work put into the song. We could dive into the idea of cognitive listening verses passive and active listening here as well. This fact stands as an intriguing tension between critics and designers. The mission statement often repeated in media interviews with designers at Harmonix Music Systems, the company that developed Guitar Hero and Rock Band is labeled: “To give that awesome feeling [of performing music] to people who aren’t musicians, who would never get to have it.“
There is a certain atmosphere when one is playing the game. If someone is playing a particularly hard song, they garner attention from the entire room. In that sense, that person is really the “ rock star” of the performance.
So I ask you this: is there an air of creativity when one plays Guitar Hero?
…well yes and no to an extent. No because you are reenacting someone else’s work, yes because you are creating the music; you are guiding the song. Without you there is no music and no play.
There is a reason why the game is so popular, and that is ease of use. It takes a lot of time and hard work to learn to play a real guitar, as opposed to the ease of just jumping into a song with no knowledge of it and press buttons that represent the melody. There is a certain instant satisfaction of doing something like that, where as learning a real guitar does not grant that initially, but does later down the road if one continues to pursue it. “What 9 year old kid would want to pick up a real guitar when picking up a plastic one is so easy?”
However the “pros” of the guitar hero world put as much time, if not more, than an actual musician learning guitar or playing in a band. If the game existed in the 80’s, would we have the bands we know and love today? …Or would we have all Freddy Mercury and Hendrix and Bellamy all playing plastic guitars? Comparing a game to the real art, despite the numerous similarities, is seen to be as “absurd” to the more high-end players. All in all at the end of the day is the simple fact that this is just a video game where you learn to push buttons rhythmically, nothing more than that.
“Why play a racing game when you can go out and drive your car? Why play a musical game when you can just learn the instrument yourself? Why play a role playing game when you can just stab squirrels in your backyard?”
In the future, we will all be using some sort of alternate technology for creating music, different from the fundamentals we encounter today. But technology is still evolving today, to the point where games and music start to become intertwined. Here is an article about the direction the “controller guitar” is headed.
Audio in games is also evolving to the point where the game is controlled by the audio: Beat Hazard and Audiosurf are both programs where the user gets to choose the song and the effects in game are directly affected by the song:
Beat Hazard:
…or vise versa: The Future of DJing?
Additionally, new games like Rocksmith have been under production that actually feature a real guitar in a gaming setting.
Reflecting back here:
In terms of the physics of sound-creation, there’s a necessary relation on the "real” instrument between buttons pressed and sound produced, which obviously isn’t the case on the plastic controller. But, in terms of what the performer does as far as physical exertion and pattern memorization, the labor done by the fingers in executing a musical “script” really is quite similar. I fear that we often romanticize music-making and the creativity involved when there’s actually a huge component of “real” musical proficiency that adds up to nothing more than note learning, conformity to scripts, and muscle memory.
As a closing statement: Guitar Hero is a video game that inspires anyone to play music, whether they are actually a musician or not. It evokes joy in people because for a brief 3 minutes, they can actually feel like rockstars. The game was never meant to be a simulation for an actual instrument, but was supposed to elicit that feeling of “epicness” one gets when they put their hands over the five colored buttons on their plastic guitar.
10-4,
~MJ