Guitar Zero

There is an exploding trend in videogaming that has moms freaking out in WalMart on Black Friday, kids gluing themselves to the TV for hours and hours on end to master a song, and experts going back and forth on whether or not it is all beneficial. Guitar Hero is taking over the country, and no, it is not beneficial. Guitar Hero consists of a game in which the player can "play" popular rock songs while they push the appropriate buttons on their guitar-shaped controller as the commands of which button to push come down the screen. Also the player must make the guitar strumming motion with their right hand at the same time. There are dozens of songs on each game and each song has different difficulty levels, so it becomes the goal to be able to play every song in the whole game. There is also a game that just came out recently called Wii Music. In Wii Music, the player can play just about any different instrument, from all different kinds of drums to guitar to saxophone to violin to piano, just by holding the game controller or waving it around in the air.

I've heard people say that Guitar Hero is "just like playing guitar!" And supporters of the game champion its ability to develop guitar technique and musical skills, as well as its proven ability to get kids interested in playing real instruments. But how true is this? Can Guitar Hero really help you play guitar? Is waving a Wiimote around in the air helping a child learn to play piano? Is it really that similar?

NO.

I played guitar for several years, and have played bass guitar for about 10. From my experience, music video games will do nothing but confuse beginners about what it is to truly play an instrument. First of all, there are more notes on a guitar than the 5 buttons on the Guitar Hero controller, and playing piano consists of precisely playing any of 88 keys in any coordinationally-challenging combination, not waving a Wiimote in the air. So then there is the problem of how to program the game so that all the notes can be played on only 5 buttons, and this is why I suck at the game. Here's the scenario: I'm playing Guitar Hero with a friend who has no knowledge of the basic mechanics of instrumental music, but who has mastered the art of pushing down any of 5 different buttons on command. We're playing along and she's nailing every note, but I'm listening to the song thinking, "this is not how Andy Summers played 'Message in a Bottle'... it should go like this-" Suddenly the song is over and I'm still trying to figure out why the buttons it told me to push didn't even follow the musical contour of the guitar solo. "Man, Ben, I would have thought you would be better at this game." I don't know how to tell her that what she's spent hours working on is in no way similar to what I do every day in real life.

These video games give very false beliefs about music. As music is such a big part of my life, I almost consider them blasphemous. People just need to remember that video games are just that - games.