Article: Confessions of a tone deaf pseudo rocker
By eduardo 1 Comments
Unfortunately, some players suffer from the lack of a few of the mentioned ingredients in this concoction of a game genre. Enter me. Guitar Hero attracted my interest since it became popular, not because I had dreams of rocking out nor the urge to follow a trend. It was the hunger for something new. As a video game player since an early age, I've enjoyed many different types of games, and as mentioned in a past article, I am a generally bad player in a lot of those. Even then, I enjoy playing.
Such was and probably will keep being the case with music games with me. The notion of entering strings of commands based on timing that comes with a song is interesting to me at best, but my execution fails miserably whenever I try to put theory into practice. Years of playing Super Mario Bros don't boost me through songs while playing a guitar shaped controller. My condition is what can be associated to the music industry term 'tone deaf'. While I can manage to pay attention to what goes on on the screen, my brain doesn't work quickly enough to follow with stimuli so my fingers can act. Thus, this usually results in many failed songs, even at a low difficulty setting.
With Rock Band, it couldn't be different. In fact, in my case, it's worse. I had the chance to try out this band game experience early in the year, and for what I was worth playing, I managed to get even worse results. This was due to the fact that one failing part of a band has to be 'held on' by the fellow band members in their own instrumental playing. Even playing a secondary (or even tertiary) role like base playing turned out to be a flop. Tomatoes, lettuces and cabbages were expected to come flying after the virtual gig.
The true question comes as - is there a cure for this virtual tone deafness? Can it even be considered an ailment if a certain person cannot be good at a certain form of interactive activity? People work on getting better in sports, for an example, but even then, there are cases of someone being just plain bad. Experience, in many cases, proves to be vital, and the true obstacle for improvement is impatience, at least in most cases. Instant results are what drive the modern person, and relates to music just as well. Very few are actually gifted with the ability to easily manipulate musical instruments, and knowledge comes with time. The music game can be compared to the real interaction with an instrument up to a point - memorization and coordination. Like in a band, the musician has to know the song that is going to be performed. All the while, knowing the song has the leverage of the possibility of their own interpretation of it. In a game, the song played is inflexible, the notes are always the same and in theory, it is a matter of memorizing rather than interpreting a musical piece.
With that in mind, a connection can be made between some apparently distant game types - the musical rhythm and puzzle. In both, you find yourself memorizing patterns in order to achieve a certain goal. A puzzler thrusts the player into the next challenge, while the music game brings a new song to be mastered.
This link is a possible thread for me to understand my utter frustration with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band - while I enjoy the experience of trying to perform a song, I can't get past the notion that the tracks and notes running on the screen are, in my head, nothing more than patterns to be memorized. It seems hard to grasp that I could actually learn to change my mind set in order to excel at those games. Like mentioned before, maybe this is a matter of impatience on my part. I like to think of it as a personal trait. I am not ashamed to admit my virtual tone deafness, but I am willing to keep trying.