By allowing more than 2 million gamers to become ax slingers without the years of practice involved, Guitar Hero has become a cultural phenomenon. Technically, you are not creating music by pushing buttons on the fret board of the game controller (which button to push is dictated by similarly colored dots that scroll on your screen at higher and higher speeds). Hitting the right button at the right time simply unlocks music that real guitarists created using real guitars. Yet the illusion is given that you are actually making the sounds yourself. Surprisingly, some of the most avid fans of this faux musician exercise are actual musicians; the game is a fixture on tour buses.
By bestowing the rewards of virtuosity to those who haven’t spent years to earn it, is Guitar Hero dumbing down musicianship? Alex Rigopulos, CEO of Harmonix, says that the intent of Guitar Hero is to provide the thrills of real musicianship to those who would not otherwise have the opportunity. “For me, learning to play the guitar solo to ‘Bark at the Moon’ would take five years, and even then I couldn’t do it right,” he says. “But spending two or three weeks learning to do it on Guitar Hero is not too much time–and I’ll really be able to feel like I’m playing it.” In that sense it’s no different from other experiences made virtually accessible by the computer, from being a World War II sniper to playing golf like Tiger Woods.
As digital technology becomes deeply integrated into “real” instruments, we can expect the shortcuts to virtuosity that we see in Guitar Hero to become commonplace in music. “One of the issues that musical instruments have is that they’re difficult to learn,” says Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of Gibson Guitar, which is aggressively integrating computer technology into new product lines. “Building calluses and painstakingly learning all the musical fingering is not creative, but is the discipline to get the creative rewards … In the future we want to reduce the crap you have to deal with to allow people access to that creativity.” It sounds great–just as the Devil’s offer must have struck Robert Johnson at the crossroads.
