September 20th, 2007
My Hero
I actually think this video game Guitar Hero might produce a new wave of killer musicians. Or at least a new wave of people with the capacity to be killer musicians.
I had the chance to play it for the first time recently. Being a halfway decent guitar player, I feel qualified to say that learning Guitar Hero is nothing like learning the actual guitar. However, being someone who, at various points in his life, has tried to learn songs on the drums, piano, mandolin, ukulele, banjo, harp, accordion, etc., I feel qualified to say that learning Guitar Hero is like learning a brand new musical instrument. ’Cause the principles of picking up any instrument are basically the same. You need focused eye-to-brain-to-hand connections, an understanding of how passages fit into a piece rhythmically, and an ability to memorize and repeat.
Guitar Hero touches on all these aspects, as well as instilling the most important lesson of all: if you can push past the point when you just want to take a framing hammer and smash the stupid, uncompromising instrument you’re trying to learn into a million tiny pieces, you can get to a place where you can do some pretty cool things with it.
And, well, this is as far as my analysis of Guitar Hero can go. I have no idea how it holds up as a video game. I have no points of comparison because — this is probably going to sound weird, but— I have only played video games a handful of times in my life. When it comes to game systems, I am one of those confused, hairy ape-men from the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hobble up and nudge the Xbox or PlayStation or whatever with my finger, then when a disc drive opens or something, I freak out and and run to the corner of the room. As my seven-year-old female cousin enters the room, pops in a game, and seats herself in front of TV to play, I observe and grunt to myself uneasily.
I have no idea why I’m like this, but I think it may have something to do with, oh, I don’t know: MY PARENTS NOT BUYING ME A NINTENDO DURING MY CHILDHOOD.
Crazy, right? And I begged and pleaded for one. Everyone I knew had one. Mom, Dad, can we please get a Nintendo? “Nintend-no.” So while everyone else my age was in their den, absorbing the ins-and-outs of gaming, I was playing outside like a schmuck. They were blowing up buildings; I was digging purposeless holes in the backyard. They were blasting ducks out of the sky; I was keeping frogs in leaky aquariums. They were jumping over lakes of acid; I was running down the street with one of those hoops you hit with a stick…. Ok, I never actually did that last one, it’s just something from a Norman Rockwell painting, but you get the idea.
As you might imagine, I didn’t have much to contribute to the cafeteria conversation from grades 4–7. All the other boys were talking about something called “Punch Out” with someone named “Mike Tyson,” neither of which I knew anything about. I dreaded every social gathering that was held in an arcade, because I didn’t understand how any of the machines worked and I had to spend most of my time just trying to give my tokens away. I’d go to sleepovers and someone would stick this bizarre multi-buttoned gray thing into my hands and command me to “go!” (Young boys aren’t big on verbal explanations, in case you didn’t know.) Then I’d have it taken away from me minutes later, to complaints that I “sucked.”
Granted, all this was during my shy and awkward years, which made everything 100 times worse than it had to be. Once I got more willing to be adventurous and just try stuff even if I wasn’t good at it, I was in high school and sitting on the couch cradling a controller wasn’t a big recreational activity anymore. The fact that I was never expert at — or interested in — video games was no longer a constant source of shame.
From then on, it was only an inconstant source of shame. Every once in a while, gaming still works its way into my peers’ lives…and therefore into my life.
During Steph and I’s first year of dating, for example, we went to visit her family in New Bern and we found ourselves banished to her little brother’s room while her mom met with some clients in their downstairs. James had a TV and the NES Steph had grown up with in his room and, to my slight consternation, Steph turned it on and started rifling through games to put in. There were no other viable entertainment options in the eight-year-old’s room (“Sure you don’t want to play with these GI Joe guys instead, Steph?”), so I bit the bullet and took the multi-buttoned gray thing.
I can remember the look of bewilderment on my wife’s face as I sent Mario barrelling straight into the second or third anthropomorphic mushroom in line, killing him instantly, and cursing in frustration every time. After about fifteen minutes of watching me struggle, I heard her mutter “Wow. I thought all boys were supposed to be good at video games.”
All boys are supposed to be good at video games, my dear. No one knows that better than me.
Soon after this, I made a serious attempt to improve my gaming skills. Figuring I should start at square one, I got ahold of a program that replicated all of the old school Nintendo games on a Mac laptop (and was therefore hugely popular with the future graphic designers at school). “When you sit down and play Metroid it’s just like back in the day!” my friend Joey told me, as he burned it onto a disc for me. I tried to laugh knowingly, the grade-school-cafeteria-feeling creeping back into my consciousness.
Steph relishes recounting the semester that I spent every spare minute in my dorm room, on my Powerbook, trying to beat the first Super Mario Brothers, and, honestly, hating every minute of it. Whatever part of the brain that ingests and processes the concepts of video games — from making the most basic movements, to the arching narrative that is supposed to be guiding you through levels — just never developed for me. I never even came close to beating that damn Mario Brothers.
So as far as games I actually enjoy go, the list is a short one:
- Gran Turismo: Also, a few of the others where you just race cars around, and you don’t have to shoot guns that are mounted on the cars or get out and collect gambling debts and kill hookers.
- Tekken: When you checked into a male dorm in 1998, you were issued a copy of either GoldenEye or Tekken 3 (along with a Bob Marley blacklight poster and emptied bottles of Jagermeister and AfterShock to use as decoration). I was in a Tekken room, which was ideal for me, because all you had to do was mash your thumbs around randomly and you could make your guy do some pretty sweet moves…. What a game.
- Tetris: It’s Tetris.
Now I can add Guitar Hero to the list. Even though people who’ve had more exposure to video games will probably always do a little better at it, those of us who know music can hang in there, too.
I have to say, I feel almost vindicated.
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