This would not be a tragedy if it occurred. Video games have been important to me since we got our first computer back in 1982, but their importance has waxed and waned. Certainly books have been much more important to me than games over the years, I think on balance music has probably also been more important to me, and in school (undergrad and grad) I spent more time watching movies than playing games, though that was somewhat of an anomaly. (That’s what happens when you’re dating, I guess.) So perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from games; and, indeed, I’ve explicitly been making more time to read books, to make and listen to music, and ever since we got our new TV, I’ve been watching more movies. (And they look fabulous on it!) Given that, maybe I just don’t have time to play games other than Rock Band, and maybe I’m completely okay with that.

That was my tentative hypothesis earlier this year: I felt disconnected at GDC this March, and suspected that I wouldn’t be going back next year. (I now realize that this year’s GDC has had huge, unexpected benefits, so I’ll certainly be going back next year, but most of those benefits aren’t directly game related.) Thinking about it more, though, and in light of subsequent experiences, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

In retrospect, the main change may be that I freed up time to read books in part by cutting down on my web browsing, and in particular I stopped reading any daily video game news sites. For almost half a year, I’ve been quite out of touch with current video game releases, not reading reviews of the vast majority of games or even being aware that they’ve been released at all. I still hear about some new games through non-news blogs and through people on Twitter, but the volume is less; and those fora almost never expose me to preview coverage, and people talk about old games quite a bit as well on them. I’d thought of myself as abnormally good at avoiding the pull of the new, but in retrospect I underestimated how much I’d been affected by the novelty-driven news cycle.

Cutting down on browsing has freed up time to spend on other art forms when I want to; but the removal of that news cycle surface current has allowed deeper currents to manifest themselves, and some of those deeper currents are unquestionably video game focused. I recently played Mass Effect 3 and Journey; they’re both wonderful, wonderful games, and they are both very much what I wanted to do at that time, I wanted to play them more than read any book or watch any movie. (Though not, as it turns out, look at any painting.)

They’re also both new games; so I’m not as free from the lure of the release cycle as I’d like to pretend. I suspect, however, that they’ll largely be an aberration in that respect in my game playing over the summer. The games that I want to play next are Rez, Child of Eden, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, probably Jet Grind Radio, maybe Dragon Age 2, maybe even Shenmue or Shenmue II or Space Channel 5. Some newish games, and nothing ancient in there, but generally older games, generally games I’ve played before and want (need!) to experience again.

And they’re generally games that have something in common. (Besides the obvious link, namely the Dreamcast!) I wish I had a better analytical category to put them in, but in the absence of one, I’ll just say it: most of those games are games that speak to something deep in my soul. They’re not just games I enjoy, games that I’ve learned something from, games that I will learn something from the next time I play them. They’re games that have their hooks deep inside of me, games where replaying them will feel like returning to home. But more than that: most of them are games where I suspect playing them will make me feel like a better person, and also feel more like me, letting me learn more who I am and giving me hope that the real me is a pretty good person.

So yeah, games are still important to me. That’s not exclusive to games: I can think of plenty of books, plenty of pieces of music that I feel the same way about, and I hope I’ll spend a lot of time oven the next year or two immersed in those art forms. But games aren’t going anywhere; I’m just going to do a better job of listening to the voices of games that are quietly calling me.

In particular, I Wanna Be Sedated starts off moving between the fifth fret on the E string and the seventh fret on the A string; so there’s our I-V, I guess IV is left out? It stays in that vein for a while, then mixes things up a bit: we see the seventh fret on the E string (II, or ii—it’s an open fifth, I guess I’ll go with II), has an excessively transparent key change that slides your hand up a couple of frets, and also spends time on the second and fourth frets as well (another key change, I guess?).

At this point, my readers who know the song and know a bit of music theory are laughing at me. (I was expecting yesterday’s post to be the one this week to lead to the most feelings of lingering shame for me this week, but nope: turns out that music theory is a more powerful force of shame for my brain than sex.) Because the above is quite incorrect; I figured that out eventually, but it took three or four times through the song before I realized that I’d made a mistake. The first curiosity was wondering about that II in the absence of a IV; and I also was trying to figure out why the shift down to the second and fourth frets didn’t actually sound like a key change. And, as my subconscious was pondering those issues, I realized that the song started on the 7th fret of the A string rather than on the 5th fret of the E string; if we go with my prior analysis, that would mean that we were starting on V.

Which, of course, the song isn’t: it’s starting on I. So if the chord that I’d previously (mis)labeled as V is actually a I, then the chord that I’d previously alleged was I is actually a IV, and that alleged II is really a V. In other words, instead of the song spending a lot of time going between I and V, it spends a lot of time going between I and IV, building up a rather pleasant amount of tension before finally throwing a V in there. (In fact, the fifth fret on A is an E chord, the fifth fret on E is an A chord, and the seventh fret on E is a B chord, so we have the same E-A-B progression that we saw in I Love Rock and Roll, just on different strings/frets, and with the E chord an octave higher.) Basically, there’s another pattern that you can use for power chords to get the I-IV-V progression: I is fret N on the A string, IV is fret N-2 on the E string, and V is fret N on the E string. I guess you use this if you want the I to be on the top, whereas you use the pattern I talked about in the first paragraph if you want I to be on the bottom.

The one thing I got right: yes, there is a key change halfway through. (That one is so ludicrously exposed that even my brain is unable to misinterpret it.) So we get the same pattern but shifted up two frets, on the seventh/ninth frets instead of the fifth/seventh. The stuff on the second/fourth frets isn’t a key change at all, though: the second fret on the E string is an octave down from the ninth fret on the A string, so that’s just I reappearing, on the bottom this time instead of the top. (And the fourth fret on the A string is the exact same chord as the ninth fret on the E string—V in both cases—with the position presumably being chosen to minimize the amount of vertical distance that your hands need to travel.)

Fun stuff: I enjoyed playing the song, I enjoyed learning something in the process. The main technical deficiency that it pointed out was my alternating strumming abilities: Dan Bruno confirmed my suspicion that I was supposed to be alternating strumming those power chords, and while I’ve been practicing alternating strumming individual strings, I haven’t been practicing alternating strumming power chords at all. Something to work on (and something I can practice outside of game), which is good; I imagine I’ll return to the song regularly over the next few weeks to if/how I’m improving.

And if my brain can get more consciously attuned to how familiar chord progressions sound (and feel!), rather than having me depend on mathematics plus lingering doubts from my unconscious, that will be awesome.

Which omission we remedied last month. And: a wonderful movie, as it turns out. (With a lot of very attractive men in it, no surprise there.) And one that is moving in ways I hadn’t expected: I’d forgotten the details of the subplot involving George going blind (and I have a different context for that subplot than I did back in 1994), and Richard Burton’s transition over the course of the movie touched me much more than I’d thought it would.

But, for me, it still comes back to the songs. So:

First and foremost: Pop-A-Boner. I am a sucker for that sort of close harmony, and the lyrics are charming and witty; seeing it doesn’t add too much to listening to it, but the participants are certainly easy on the eyes. I don’t have a lot to say about this song, but it has been and will remain the main reason why I listen to the album as frequently as I do.

The second song that had stuck with me is the Butthole Duet. I can’t find a video of it to embed here, which is very sad: if there’s one thing better than a musical starring Patient Zero and Richard Burton, it’s a song in a musical that’s sung by the assholes of Patient Zero and Richard Burton!

I’d mostly liked the song in the past because I thought that idea was very amusing; musically, it’s fine, but nothing special. (Though the harmonizing in the bit about assholes, phalluses, and patriarchy crumbling is nice.) In the context of the movie, though, it’s quite a bit more poignant than on the CD.

Just listening to the song, you learn that Richard Burton isn’t into anal sex (at least receptive): he wants to be open-minded, but dislikes the idea at a fairly fundamental level, and puts an overly intellectual spin on the situation. Patient Zero, of course, approaches the topic with more enthusiasm and in a much more straightforward manner.

Which is all well and good, but the movie’s framing adds quite a bit to that interpretation. To begin with, before the song starts, Richard Burton shows up in bed covered head to toe in plastic. Which is great for a laugh, but it adds more depth to the scene in a couple of different ways. For one thing, he’s not rejecting the idea of anal sex out of hand: he’s presenting himself as willing to give it a go, he just wants to make sure he’s protected. (And, of course, looking ridiculous and de-eroticizing the situation in the process.) Which leads to the other thing, that there are (at least) two reasons why he’s reluctant: the scene opens up with him not wanting to die from having sex, and it’s really only as we get to the song that he starts to be more honest about his feelings, that he might have other reasons for his misgivings. And even the nature of those misgivings needs exploration: as he sings, “my taboos run very deep”: how much of his misgivings are culturally conditioned taboos versus personal preferences that are inherent in his nature?

So we start from Richard Burton presenting himself as wanting to give it a go but not wanting to die as a result; that facade starts to crumble almost immediately, but picking out what’s really going on in his feelings is hard, he has mental defenses that mean that it’s probably not even particularly clear to himself what’s going on. And, as somebody who overintellectualizes a lot of situations and who started first having sex at a time when AIDS was relatively new and was a death sentence, I can very much sympathize with this: it’s one of the tragedies of AIDS (albeit a small tragedy in the grand scale of that disease) that its presence makes navigating your sexual feelings, your sexual awakening that much harder. The emotional waves that sex is tied up with are bad enough when you’re not used to dealing with them (and if you’re pretty uptight to begin with), and of course non-AIDS diseases are problematic enough, and (switching over to straight sex) pregnancy is staggeringly important; antibiotics and contraception made those manageable, but then AIDS came along.

But even that isn’t the end of the story: just listening to the song misses the framing that the movie provides at the end as well as the beginning. Because Richard Burton really is starting to fall in love with Patient Zero; I’m not sure exactly what the two of them would work out physically, but my guess is that they’d find something that worked for them. Getting Richard Burton’s feelings about sex out on the table is important, but that doesn’t mean that he has to be ruled by his initial fears: talk things out, try things out, and something good will come of it. Again, though: AIDS makes this a lot harder. (Setting aside, of course, the fact that Patient Zero is a ghost who will disappear again soon!)

The last song I want to talk about is the one that plays during the opening, Just Like Sheherazade. Again, pleasant enough to listen to, and I actually didn’t think about it too much while I was watching the movie, either.

In the weeks since then, though, my brain has been coming back to it more and more. Because that song is all about telling stories, and that’s what my brain has been obsessed with over the last year. It first hit me when I was trying to figure out what was going on with my job search; since then, though, I’ve watched my feelings shift in different directions in response to the different stories I’m telling myself, I’ve seen mysterious behaviors on my friends’ parts come into focus once I learn what stories they’re telling themselves, I’ve seen the problems (and the potentially productive clashes!) that arise when different participants in an interaction are telling different stories about a given situation. So yeah, Sheherazade: tell a story.

And, of course, that’s a very powerful theme for a movie about AIDS. Because if you try to pretend that AIDS is simply a disease, that we can understand what’s going on by looking at it through a scientific lens (indeed, if you believe that the notion of a scientific lens is unproblematic in that context), you will be acting willfully blind. (In which light, I suppose it’s no coincidence that the movie has a subplot about going blind.) Because wherever sex and gay people show up, the country’s (I say writing as an American, though of course it’s a Canadian movie) puritanical streak will raise its head; and also wherever sex shows up, desire will start to swamp reason; and AIDS is not just any disease, if we don’t figure out how to cure it or at least control it (which we very much hadn’t back in 1994), lots of people will die, your friends will die, maybe you will die. It’s impossible to think about AIDS without multiple stories playing out in your heads; and you’d be sticking your head in the sand to think that you can do science without being affected by these stories, that (for example) the people participating (or wanting to participate!) in your experimental drug trials don’t have stories that are powerful, that are worthy of respect and admiration, to forget that they’re entrusting their lives and the lives of their friends and lovers to the success of your research.

Which means that, indeed, they may have zero patience for stumbles, for missteps, for prejudice, for greed. But wishful thinking isn’t enough: whether that lack of patience will transform into progress is not so clear. And it’s a mercy to occasionally relieve that lack of patience with a return to the pleasures of bathhouses, bodies, and three-part harmonies.

It’s a very simple song, built around the three simplest chords possible: I-IV-V, where I is an E power chord (open E string, index finger on the second fret of the A string, middle finger on the second fret of the D string), IV is an A power chord (open A string, index finger on the second fret of the D string, middle finger on the second fret of the G string), and V is a B power chord (index finger on the second fret of the A string, ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, pinky on the fourth fret of the G string). So you move your hand between those three positions, with the occasional flourish thrown in.

And it’s the details of those hand movements that got to me. The I-IV transition is performed by shifting your entire hand up a string, reflecting the fact that each of the bottom four strings on a guitar is a fourth up from the next lower string. (Or, alternatively: the tuning on a guitar is chosen exactly to express that I-IV power chord shift; this is different from a violin, for example, where adjacent strings are separated by a fifth instead of the fourth.) Also lurking in this transition is the fact that you play the second fret on the D string in both chords: the chords in question are open fifths, so this expresses that if you go a fifth up from IV, you get back down to I, meaning that an E shows up in both of them.

Next, the IV-V transition. Here, the chords are a whole step apart from each other; that’s expressed in the simplest way possible, by shifting your left hand up two frets while playing the same strings. (So, in particular, the two chords have no notes in common.)

Finally, we go from V back to I. Power chords are open fifths, so the the two notes that make up the I are simply the E that’s its root and the B which is the root of the B power chord that’s the V in this sequence. (In any of these chords, the third note is repeats the bottom note an octave up.) In particular, B shows up in both chords, and in both chords, you’re playing that B with your index finger: and when making the V-I shift, you keep that index finger in place, but shift the positions of the other fingers. (Actually, when you make that transition in the song, it throws in a G (third fret on the E string, which in that context I play with my ring finger) between those two chords, but you can leave your index finger in place while playing that G as well.) This gives that transition a different feel from playing the I-IV-V power chord sequence in keys other than E: if you weren’t starting from an open string, then the V-I transition would involve sliding your whole hand left and up, so none of the fingers would stay in the same place.

So: your hands move less than you might expect, and that fact reflects something about the relationship between the chords involved, that they’re rotating somehow around the B. It’s not the only place where my hands moved less than I might expect: there’s a little flourish that you perform several times, and when I first ran into that in practice mode, I was a bit stymied by it. Eventually, though, I realized how little my hands had to move when performing that flourish, and it became much easier. (This unfolding of quiet simplicity happens to me all the time when learning bits on pro keys; not as often in the past on guitar, though I imagine that will change as I get better and have to deal with more notes.) That flourish sometimes comes after a I and sometimes after a V; in both cases, though, it’s approximately as easy to play, and in both cases that B you’re playing with your index finger is a key note.

Some other bits that struck me while going through the song:

• The flourish mentioned in the previous paragraph involves a pull-off; I can go through the motions well enough for the game to score me as playing it successfully, but when I play it unmuted and plugged in, I sound a lot worse unless I’m very careful and crisp with my finger movements. So clearly something to work on.

• Sometimes, when the guitar part comes in after being quite for a while, you play I, and sometimes, you play V. Which I hadn’t really noticed when listening to the song (my pitch recognition can clearly use some work!), but once I was aware of that possibility, I could tell which chord to expect: not so much because I recognized the notes but because my brain could feel that the V-I resolution was coming up. Which gave me a lot more appreciation for the Suzuki practice of listening to songs on CD over and over again before playing them: that’s what I’ve effectively been doing by going through every on-disc Rock Band 3 multiple times on multiple instruments before I first started playing them on expert pro guitar, and it’s seeping into my understanding at a subconscious level of how the songs are put together.

• The song has two sections involving lots of alternating strumming. In one of them, where I had to shift which note I was strumming, I had to practice at slower speeds; I eventually managed to play it successfully at 95% speed but not at full speed. Close, though, and I’m glad I’ve started practicing hard bits slowed down and going through the whole solo separately. (I’ll need to do that more and more to have any chance at not embarrassing myself as the solos get less straightforward.)

  In the other (much longer but much simpler) alternating strumming bit, though, I managed to keep my streak going for quite some time; listening to myself plugged in, I wasn’t quite as regular as I would have liked, but still: progress!

• One of my disappointments when playing Beatles Rock Band was how hard it was to play guitar while singing: those are songs I know well, songs I should be able to sing on autopilot, but I generally couldn’t manage that while playing expert guitar. I was curious how much that had to do with the fact that doing two things at once is hard and how much had to do with the artificial nature of Rock Band fake plastic guitar.

  As I started to get comfortable with the guitar part for I Love Rock and Roll, however, I noticed myself singing along with the song during easy sections and breaks in the guitar part; so once my guitar playing got decent, I pulled out a mic stand, turned on a second controller, and had the game score me on both simultaneously. I got 90% on pro guitar and 95% on vocals (expert in both cases), and while I can do better playing either side of that by itself, those scores are more than good enough to support the hypothesis that the structure of real guitar playing allows my fingers to work more on autopilot so I can devote more of my brain to my singing. Which isn’t to say that the two didn’t interfere: it was definitely a good thing that I didn’t have to sing during the aforementioned flourishes, and when alternating strumming bits showed up I generally stopped singing while my brain focused on establishing the rhythm, though I did manage to get back to singing after a few measures of the alternating strumming.

A great way to spend half an afternoon. And I’m only three songs in! I can’t wait to see what the rest of the songs are like in their full glory.

Music is forcing its way into my life again, and I’m very glad for that. But I keep on looking wistfully at my bookshelf, and asking myself why I’m not spending more time with them. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Jacobs recently, and in particular it’s well past time for me to revisit Systems of Survival; or I’ve been talking with a friend of mine recently about Buddhism, thinking it’s time for me to revisit that. (I suspect I’m the only person in my circle of bloggers who studied Pali for a couple of years in college and who has 45 volumes of the Pali Canon sitting on his bookshelf; I’m particularly fond of the elephants on the spines of those books!) It’s not that I don’t read books at all, and in fact sometimes an author will still grab me and I’ll read several of her books in close sequence; but it’s far too common for me to go multiple weeks without finishing a book.

And that’s not good. So I have to make more time to read. Regularly carve out time in the weekends to read; but I should also carve out a weekday evening a week to read too, I think.

That, of course, means that something has to go, especially since I’m spending more time than I had been on music. So, the first step: re-examine my long-term ongoing projects. Do I want to continue studying Japanese, do I want to continue learning guitar? The answer to both of those is yes, so they’re staying.

Do I want to continue to read and write blogs? I certainly want to continue to write; in fact, I’m hoping that I’ll start blogging more about books! I don’t want to stop reading blogs, either, but that’s clearly an area where I can do more pruning, and constrain my blog reading more: I don’t want to have evenings where I start reading blogs, then do a bit of this and a bit of that, and end up feeling unhappy with myself. (I’m totally fine with spending evenings doing bits of this and that if I end up feeling happy with myself, though: sometimes I’m just feeling blah, and should recognize and embrace that.) That alone may actually be enough to help me carve out one evening a week.

Do I want to continue to play video games? That question gave me pause, but I think ultimately the answer there is a clear yes: Christopher Hyde I am not. But, as with reading blogs, I should be more aware of what I’m playing. It’s time to stop playing games just because I feel that I should, and instead to play games that I feel are calling to my soul in some way. So fewer sequels, more returning to old favorites (I just got a refurbished Dreamcast: here I come, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue, and of course the PS3 Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remakes), and when considering new games, I’ll lean towards games that I hope will speak to something deeper within myself (Child of Eden, presumably preceded by Rez HD; Dragon Age 2). (Actually, if my brain is telling me to spend more time on music and on Buddhism, then Child of Eden is probably a rather good fit!) It’ll be a while before I start any games, though: I imagine I have at least another year of Rock Band 3 in front of me, Ni No Kuni DS will probably take me a couple more months, and one non-Rock Band game at a time is my limit.

And then there’s the possibility of new creative projects forcing themselves upon my brain. Fortunately, right now I’m at a bit of lull in terms of feeling that I need to program something at home (doubtless helped by the fact that programming at work is rather interesting); if that changes, though, I’ll embrace it and re-evaluate. Hmm, thinking about games, I wish I were spending more time playing board games, too; and I should be spending more time with non-family members outside of work. In college, I watched movies a fair amount; I miss that, but I’m comfortable enough having that stay by the wayside for the time being.

So: a balancing act. But it always is, and it always comes down to: what is my soul telling me to do? Right now, my soul is telling me to draw strength from friends, and that the friends I’ve been neglecting the most are books.

Of course, with that richness comes challenges: hard difficulty asks you to learn much much more on a technical level than previous difficulty settings. Looking back, I started playing pro guitar around March 12th; I started medium on April 3rd, so easy took three weeks to complete. I started hard on June 19th, so medium took two and a half months to complete. Which is longer than anything else I’d tried to do in Rock Band other than my attempt to ascend the pro keys leaderboards, but I didn’t make it to expert until December 4th, meaning that I spent five and a half months on hard, learning quite a lot along the way.

The first thing that I learned was the very existence of power chords: not having any real knowledge of rock guitar in advance, I didn’t realize that, in a lot of rock guitar, you’re playing three note chords that are open fifths instead of major or minor triads. In retrospect, I’m a bit embarrassed that I’d gone so long without being aware of that fact: clearly my ears need a lot more training! But now that I’m aware of them, I’m finding power chords rather fascinating: open fifths are, indeed, powerful to listen to (a fact that is getting reinforced by the current piece I’m learning on the piano, the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering, in which the entries of the second, fourth, and (amazingly) sixth voices all have open fifths that are simply glorious), and on a physical level power chords give my fingers something interesting to do (and in particular force me to be comfortable moving up and down the fretboard) without requiring too much in the way of precision.

I was aware of the existence of barre chords, and expected them to be a bit challenging at first; they proved to be a pain, both metaphorically and literally. The game’s training mode has a set of barre chord exercises, and the first time I tried them, it hurt too much for me to make it past the halfway point of the set. I made it further the second week, but even then I couldn’t finish the last of the exercises, which asked me to shift between barred E major and minor and barred A major and minor chords, on at least two different frets. Also adding to the difficulty was my uncertainty as to how to play barred A major chords: the game tells me to use my top three fingers to hold down the non-barred notes, but I had a hard time getting that to work. (My guitar consultants on twitter said that playing all three notes with your ring finger was more common, and that worked better for me.)

I confronted that difficulty head-on, practicing barre chords every night unmuted for a few weeks. And, sure enough, they became less of a disaster: the next week, I managed to make it through that problematic lesson, and fairly soon after that I managed to make it through barre chords in actual songs without too much trouble. Though, in retrospect, I stopped practicing barre chords outside of game too quickly, and should get back to them: they’re a core technique, they needs to be rock solid, and when I tried those lessons today, I made it through them all acceptably but not flawlessly and my hand hurt. So clearly there’s quite a bit of room for improvement.

The other technique that I’ve been practicing outside of game is alternating strumming. I haven’t been doing anything fancy there, just spending two or three minutes strumming as quickly as possible on each of the strings. And it’s made a big difference, though there’s still room for improvement: I’m not as fast or as regular as I’d like, and I suspect my muscles are way too tense. Definitely glad I’ve been doing that.

And there are other techniques that I’ve been exposed to, all of which have quite a lot of room for improvement. I’m better at non-barred chords than barre chords, but not wonderful, and there are many more chord variants out there for me to learn. I enjoy scales when I run into them, but I’ve only barely begun to memorize them. I’m still a lot worse than I should be at playing arpeggiated chords. I don’t get the point of dropped-D tuning: it never feels easier to me. (It probably doesn’t help that it’s most heavily used in metal, which I don’t enjoy listening to and wouldn’t enjoy playing even if it used a standard tuning.) I need to experiment more with how hammer-on/pull-offs sound when plugged in.

But at least I have been playing songs plugged in. Not all the time, and rarely for very long, but if a song is in a standard tuning and isn’t solo heavy, I’d generally give it a try unmuted and plugged into the amp. (After practicing it a couple of times in the standard game mode, of course.) Sometimes, it sounds okay; sometimes it sounds dreadful. I haven’t been diving into playing unplugged, but that’s going to change with Expert.

In fact, a lot is going to change with Expert. You’ll notice in the above that there’s a lot of talking about techniques that I need to get better at, and very little talk about actual music. Which, in its own way, is actually a sign of how rich the game is: it asks me to do enough that I have to concentrate on the details of what my hands are doing, even performing abstract exercises outside of game, instead of going with the flow of the art of the music. And I’m willing to do that exactly because I can now see the art of the music in front of me, and I’m learning quite concretely what I’ll have to do to be able to bring out that art.

And, when I get to Expert, I’ll be asked to play the full guitar parts for pieces. At that point, it will (I suspect) no longer feel satisfying to me to treat the game as a game, to play each piece well enough to get three or four stars and then to move on to the next piece. So what I’m planning to do is pick a subset of the available songs (whether on-disc or DLC, I’m looking for suggestions for the latter) and really dive into them. Play them until I can get the notes right; play them unplugged until they sound good; play them unplugged until they actually sound like they sound in the recording. (I know essentially nothing about how to produce the range of available sounds from an electric guitar.)

If I can get to something I’m happy with after playing a song after an hour, that’s fine, but I’m imagining, even hoping, that there are songs that will reward me practicing them for weeks, that I’ll occasionally return to for months on end. And songs that suggest specific techniques that I should practice outside of game; my next-door neighbor is a guitar teacher, maybe I’ll sign up for lessons with her?

Actually, I’ve already dipped my toe into playing songs on Expert, trying out the first two songs on the disc, and the experience has been wonderful. They’ve already suggested more techniques that I need to master, and brought home just how little I know about producing sound on an electric guitar. They threw extra power chord variants at me, and it made a huge difference being able to hear what those variants sounded like; I ended up playing through each song several times experimenting with different strumming variants, trying (and failing, but learning!) to mimic what I was hearing coming out of the speakers. (And the one time I went back to a song muted after playing it unmuted was a bizarre experience indeed.)

Also: I was pleased how quickly I was able to learn the songs I was playing. Don’t get me wrong: they were both simple songs, each made out of perhaps three basic building blocks. But each building block had its variants, and I had to recognize what harmonic cues meant that I should switch building blocks and memorize what variants appeared when. A very rewarding experience, much more so than the simple effort of trying to get a not-embarrassing score on a song in game before moving on.

So: that’s Rock Band. What about the rewiring, though? For one thing, my taste in what I do in the game has changed. In past entries in the series, I’d mostly concentrated on (non-pro) guitar: I went through songs on the other instruments, but only once per song/instrument combo, and generally stuck exclusively to guitar for DLC.

And I still play non-pro guitar at times—it’s how Liesl and I go through new DLC, there’s been a ton of good songs showing up recently, and I fully support non-pro guitar as a way to listen to new music. But, in general, there are three other ways that I prefer to play the game: on pro guitar, on pro keys, or, to my surprise, on vocals. (Both solo and harmonies.)

There’s a lot going on with that latter choice. Part of it is that vocal harmonies are something that I can share with Liesl, and they’re rather more intimate than playing non-pro guitar/bass together. And part of it comes from psychological triggers. But what all three of those modes have in common is that they’re a lot more musically richer: and I’m finding that I really appreciate that. I want a deeper experience, I’m seeing musical forms that I’m not familiar with as a way to experiment and grow, and, well, I’m breaking down my sense of shame more broadly (those psychological triggers again!), and it turns out that singing is an area of my life where I’m happy enough to perform badly in public. (Or in private, I’m not actively seeking out exhibitionism.) It’s definitely an area where I have a lot to learn: I’m not taking singing as seriously as I am guitar, but I start to actually feel antsy if a couple of weeks go by without me singing at all.

These increased desires to make music have spread beyond the game as well. We bought a piano a couple of months after moving into this house, and it hasn’t been rare for me to sit down at it and play something (usually show tunes, but sometimes Flanders and Swann, sometimes Studio Ghibli music, sometimes classical music) on it. But it also hasn’t been uncommon for me to go for months without touching the piano, and I certainly haven’t put in concerted effort to work on pieces.

More and more over the last few months, however, I found myself sitting down at the piano; and, at some point, I decided: I’m enjoying this, I used to be a not-completely-incompetent harpsichordist, let’s get my fingers working again. So I decided to work on a piece that I used to actually be rather good at, namely the 3-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering: I haven’t practiced it every day, but I’ve done so often enough to make steady progress.

And wow, am I glad that I’ve been doing that. It feels so good to get a somewhat thorny piece back into my fingers, to be able to play another page or two a week without tripping up multiple times a line. Then there’s thinking about phrasing while I’m doing that, playing around with different conceptions of what the music should be.

But then something quite unexpected happened: just when I got to where I was making an acceptably small number of mistakes and was thinking it might be time to move on, the way I was listening to the piece completely changed. All of a sudden, I became much more able to pick out the voices aurally and conceptually, and a lot more possibilities appeared than I’d been aware of before.

Which, honestly, scared me a bit, and I’m still poking at the piece somewhat gingerly. And, in the meantime, I’m working on learning the 6-Part Ricercar, so I have the more straightforward challenge of getting that piece into my fingers while dealing with the musicality of the 3-Part Ricercar. Though “straightforward” is the wrong word for getting the 6-Part Ricercar into my fingers—there’s way too much going on at once in that piece for that to be an accurate description of what’s going on there! And, for that matter, it’s not like I’m not paying attention to the musicality of the 6-Part Ricercar: as I mentioned in the power chords paragraph above, I’m fascinated by places where open fifths show up in that piece. Still, it’s different, and I’m glad I have both sorts of challenges right now. (And I should go to Paris this spring to visit my harpsichord teacher!)

So I’m making a lot more music than I had been. Which is part of a broader manifestation that I want to be surrounded by music. Every once in a while over the last few years, I’d read an article talking about how multitasking is impossible; those articles would frequently bring up listening to something while working, I’d note that I have a lot harder time listening to music while working than I once did, and I’d idly wonder whether that had always been the case or whether my brain had better reconciled those back when I was in school. (I listened to music all the time when working when in college.)

And now, I will say: my brain had changed away from being able to listen to music while working, and it has recently changed back. Not that I never find music distracting: lyric-heavy music poses problems, and it’s certainly the case that I’m not getting as much out of the music as I would if I weren’t working. (And we really should get symphony tickets, or tickets to some other local concert series. Both in general and for Miranda’s sake: she’s getting a good exposure to show tunes and to opera, but I think she’d enjoy chamber and orchestral music if given the opportunity.) But in general I’m finding that, these days, I prefer my life to have a soundtrack, and I’m very much enjoying both diving into the hundreds of albums I have lying around and discovering new artists. (And I’d love recommendations on the latter front, please leave some in the comments!)

Except that sometimes I am finding music distracting in startling and unexpected ways, to the extent that there are several albums that I quite like that I’m finding are quite unsafe for me to listen to work. The first albums that I recognized as such are Mika’s albums; they make me want to break into song (break into falsetto!), which my coworkers would rightfully be dubious about. But, rather worse, listening to them also makes me want to kiss somebody. And that’s something my coworkers would be more than just dubious about, and (given that she’s not one of my coworkers) “dubious” would not be the word that Liesl would choose to describe such actions even were they interested!

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with that latter effect. It’s not the thematic content of the songs themselves: last week proved that Brasta Ghibli (a fabulous fabulous brass rendition of Studio Ghibli themes) has the same effect on me, and there aren’t any lyrics there. It’s more that listening to that music fills me with joy, and an overabundance of affection (?) is one way that my brain decides to interpret that emotion.

Three months ago, I went through a manic phase; there were plusses and minuses to that experience, but I’m very glad it happened and, on balance, I miss it. I’m still not at all sure what caused that to happen or why it went away, but, in retrospect, it’s almost certainly not a coincidence that I was writing about Rock Band in the blog post where I first mentioned it. (And also not a coincidence that I was blogging about sex; I’ve got one or two more of those posts queued up too.) So if music can help me turn that switch back on when I want it, that’s great: it would make me very happy to have access to that mental state in a more controlled fashion.

Phew. And I’m only done with hard pro guitar: just imagine how I’ll be feeling when I’m in the throes of expert! Maybe I’ll get inspired by Taeyang and start dancing (I’m quite glad that ash-panic’s tumblr has been turning me on to K-pop), maybe I’ll stop blogging here and spend more and more time singing or at the piano. (Actually, I hope I won’t stop blogging, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I dialed down my video game playing soon, about which more in a bit.) Hopefully I’ll manage to stay productive enough at work to be happily employed; we’re a musical bunch, fortunately, and programming is also a creative outlet, so I’m not particularly worried on that score.

Datum one: when singing in Rock Band, I prefer to sing in my head voice. (Or in falsetto, I’m not entirely sure what, if any, distinction there is between the two terms.) Also, I’m quite happy to sing female parts instead of male parts. This is an obvious (if not unproblematic) metaphor for being gay, and is one (though not the only) reason why I labeled my vocal avatar in the game as gay.

I’ve been singing more over the last month than ever before, and I’ve frequently been having the game chose songs at random. This means that I’ve been exposed to a wider selection of vocal ranges than I get from my standard diet of female singers. So I’ve been spending more time in chest voice recently, and I’ve also been getting used to the transition zone, moving from one to the other.

And if we extend the above metaphor, then my chest voice is a metaphor for being straight, and the transition zone is a metaphor for being bi. Or, indeed, singing as a whole is a metaphor for being bi! I am, as it turns out, okay with that.

Despite my recent experiences, I still prefer singing in my head voice over my chest voice; and, actually, the quality of my tone in my head voice has (I think) improved noticeably over the last month, which I’m quite pleased by. So this metaphor ends up flipping the way my sexual preferences reveal themselves in non-musical contexts. This is fine; actually, I’ll even say that having artistic experiences point at aspects of myself that I don’t normally explore as much, then it’s actively good! And the tension of shifting between the two registers is quite pleasant to explore.

Another datum: most of the time when I pick up a microphone, I ask Liesl if she’d like to join me, and most of the time she happily accepts the invitation. It turns out that our vocal ranges are rather similar; I think she has a note or two over me on the top, but I’m not sure, and I can sustain high notes better than she can; I’m honestly not sure which of our ranges extends lower. (She has a lot more singing experience than I do; I clearly need to work on expanding my range on the bottom.) But, unlike me, she prefers to sing in her chest voice rather than her head voice; I don’t think the same metaphors work for her in this context as work for me, but that fact does rather amuse me.

And: while I am (quite!) comfortable with my preference for singing in high ranges, there is a bit of regret mixed in there as well. Because it’s also the case that deep bass voices make me respond at a quite fundamental level; if I had the voice to carry it off, I think I would probably dive whole-heartedly into lower ranges instead. In general, my type in men has a relatively androgenous face (with a slightly high-pitched voice), but that’s not the only type that I notice. Deep voices (perhaps linked with large beards and bald heads?) can also draw my attention, and part of me wishes that I could fit that mold myself. (I have the beard part down, at least! And I may reach the “bald head” part eventually?)

Speaking of low voices: I really should give the game’s pro bass mode a try. Liesl is our house bassist, and Jonathan fills that role on VGHVI Rock Band nights, but the right sort of bass line makes me sit up and take notice in a way that little else can.

So: my fascination with the physical aspects of playing Rock Band continues. It’s not the only way in which I find singing more sexually charged than other instruments, however. Because: in a band, all participants are not created equal, and in particular the singer is generally the lead. Singing therefore brings out alpha male resonances, which of course has sexual implications.

It’s not the only time the question of the extent to which I want to act like an alpha male has arisen recently: it came up as part of my job search narrative, when thinking about my character build. In particular, I had to ask during the search to what extent I wanted an explicit lead role. (Which I was thinking at the time in the context of a managerial role, but it can be interpreted more broadly; though, actually, managers, at least first-level ones, really don’t do a particularly good job of acting like alpha males.)

The conclusion that I came to at the time was that I didn’t want to be a manager: I like getting my hands dirty programming too much! (Hmm, I seem to have a bit of a hand fetish these days?) As far as some sort of technical lead goes: that’s fine if it doesn’t prevent me from programming (and I’m happy to embrace such a label if it gets me a wider variety of work, I do hope that I have developed technical skills worth sharing over the last few decades), but I’d really rather spend time on a small team where such labels don’t matter, where what matters is how individuals actually behave. Certainly joining a relatively young startup was absolutely the right move for me this time, I’d be happy to go smaller still next time.

So: explicit alpha male labels turn out to be not what I want. But I don’t want somebody else to be in charge, either: I’m fairly allergic to authority, I don’t like being told what to do, though I’m quite happy to be convinced by others’ ideas. If I have to chose between dominator and dominated, I’ll go with the former, but really I’d prefer to wave the anarcho-syndicalist flag, to be part of a commune.

Which is sexually charged in its own way! Admittedly, in a way that I’m not so convinced that I’d be interested in in real life, though I won’t know for sure without trying it. (Which seems quite unlikely.) Going back to musical metaphors: while I obviously love Rock Band, I in some sense feel like an impostor whenever I play it: what I really want is to be playing chamber music with other equals. (I eagerly await Harmonix’s forthcoming game String Quartet; dibs on cello.) (Actually, arguably, I feel like an impostor when doing anything other than playing fugues on a keyboard instrument, but there are levels of imposture.)

Coming back to singing: as I mentioned above, I generally don’t sing alone, I’m much more likely to sing with Liesl. (Probably a good thing, given the topic of this post.) And the game’s vocal harmonies mode means that we have to chose who will sing the lead and who will take harmonies; generally I do the latter. (And I’ve been getting better at harmonies recently, too!) So, returning to the question of whether I’m more dominant or submissive, there’s another answer (and a different one than I gave two paragraphs up; sexuality is complicated stuff), and it again means that I’m not a good fit for an alpha male role. (I may have said earlier on that I “need to work on expanding my range on the bottom”, but perhaps I gave myself too little credit…) All dom/sub joking aside, the vocals that I most enjoy listening to outside of the game are a-capella and choral harmonies: again, a meeting of equals is where my tastes lie.

The third way in which Rock Band vocals are sexually charged: its performative aspect. Rock Band is always a performance, in fact a double one: you’re playing a game where you pretend to be a character who is in turn on stage giving a performance. And with vocals, both aspects of this performance are strengthened: your behavior as a player is much more nuanced than when playing any of the instruments, and the singer is the most prominent person on stage.

Also: singing involves lyrics, bringing explicit narrative into the picture. And, frequently, explicitly sexual narrative: when a video game discusses infidelity, it’s rare enough to throw me for a loop, but the topic is quite unremarkable in pop music. (That’s perhaps the saddest thing about Catherine, that it and Rock Band are such outliers when it comes to the nitty-gritty of relationships, comparing them to the other games I’ve played over the last year or so.)

And there’s yet another performative aspect to the game, one that affects me personally: as I mentioned above, part of me feels like an impostor whenever I’m performing pop music. (“Pop” in the broad sense, as opposed to classical or jazz.) There were only two or three years in my life when I regularly listened to pop music on the radio, and those years are decades in the past; I just looked over the track lists of the three main Rock Band games, and if I’m counting correctly, each game contains exactly one song that I owned a copy of before playing the game. (And my music collection isn’t tiny: I don’t buy music as much as I used to, but I have something like 500 CDs around the house.)

This isn’t to say that I don’t like pop music: I do, and I’ve been listening to it significantly more often than classical music over the last few years. (We really need to get symphony tickets so Miranda can listen to more classical music; not that there’s anything wrong with the show-tunes-heavy diet that we currently feed her!) But there are huge, huge gaps in my pop music background, and in particular Rock Band is full of both bands that I’m aware of but have never really listened to and bands that I’ve never heard of.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s great: the folks at Harmonix have excellent taste, I very much appreciate having my horizons broadened, and I happily listen to the new DLC released each week and buy pieces of it not infrequently. (I’m up to 510 songs in my Rock Band collection, and of course that doesn’t count the Beatles content.) But there are quite a lot of layers built up here: I’m doing a double performance in a musical genre where I feel like an outsider, singing about a wide range of topics indeed. (Or, alternatively: singing over and over about whether or not I’m getting laid.)

So it’s one big invitation for me to think about alternate identities. And not just any alternate identities: identities that are outgoing, identities that are flamboyant, identities that are (I hope) charming at times, identities that are (returning to the lyrics) obsessed with sex. (And that have screaming crowds in support of that last one!)

And an invitation to experiment with those identities: to pick up different ones, to see what I like and what I don’t like, what surprises me, what makes me feel just a little bit uncomfortable. In fact, the very word “experiment” has sexual overtones! (“Experiment: make it your motto day and night / Experiment: and it will lead you to the light”; I eagerly await Rock Band: Cole Porter.)

Le sigh. Back to my singing. Or perhaps I’ll find some other way to pass the time this evening…

After a bit of playing, though, I realized that the colored sections weren’t arbitrary, and that the fact that different sections included different numbers of keys was a virtue: each colored section contained a single group of black keys, along with the adjacent white keys. Once I realized that, I could find notes by touch: I’d move my hands to approximately the right place, feel out the location of the group of black keys, and use that to then feel out the individual key within that color.

That worked for individual keys; what about chords? Well, if the notes in a chord were one apart, it wasn’t so hard to find the chord by feel: find the bottom note with your thumb, say, then move your index finger a little bit higher, skipping one key. It got harder the more spread-out the chord was, however; and eventually, when chords got wide enough I became completely unable to figure out the spacing.

But then I had a happy realization: sight-reading fifths and sixths was okay for me (especially since they were generally the outside notes of a triad, so the note in the middle forms a bridge); larger than that and I had difficulties. But really, if I’m playing an interval larger than a sixth, probably it’s an octave? And a bit of experimentation proved that to be correct; in particular, as far as I can tell, the game never gives you chords wider than an octave. My hands know quite well what an octave feels like, so this realization removed the difficulty from wide intervals quite nicely.

Or rather, it removed that difficulty quite nicely for me. Much of what I’d outlined above could, I think, be done by somebody new to playing keyboards: using black keys to orient yourself, and transitioning from that to playing 1-3-5 chords. But somebody new to playing keyboards can not, I’m fairly sure, simply put down their hands and know what an octave feels like: that’s muscle memory that I’ve developed over years of practice.

It’s not the only such example, either. My hands can play scales without thinking; my hands know all sorts of chords; my hands even know all sorts of chord progressions. (Though I confess, I never expected the practice I put in years ago learning how to play figured bass lines to pay off in quite this context!) I’ve gotten better at reading the game’s notation, but it’s also the case that I can get quite good at the game without becoming fluent in reading that notation: if I start with my hands on a given triad, and see that the screen is telling me that the next chord is a little bit to the right with, say, the bottom note the same and the middle note on a black key instead of a white key, then there’s probably only one chord that’s going to make sense musically given those constraints. So my hands move along to that chord, and can frequently continue for quite some time on autopilot in that fashion.

Of course, sometimes it’s not that simple. In those circumstances, playing through sections of pieces in training mode is illuminating: I’ll be unable to parse a section, but then I’ll go through the section a couple of times, slowed down if necessary, and I’ll realize what the chord transitions are. After which that section becomes trivial to read and play, with a pleasing economy of hand movements.

And I will emphasize what I said above: this makes my experience playing the game quite different from the experience of somebody who didn’t take piano lessons (or harpsichord lessons—yay figured bass practice!) for years. I can see this on the leaderboards: while in general I do well on the leaderboards for all of the songs, I do better on some than on others. On songs that have you playing the same notes over and over again quickly and precisely, I do a mediocre job, frequently failing to make it past the triple-digit ranks. I could be imagining things, but my guess is that people who are very good at playing (non-pro) Rock Band guitar are also good at that sort of piece, and such people are who’s ahead of me on the leaderboard. Whereas if I hit a piece that’s slower but that transitions between chords more frequently, it’s not unheard of for me to get into the 30-50 range on the leaderboard for that song during my first playthrough and not feel like I did a particularly good job.

That’s pro keys; recently, though, I’ve been spending more time playing the game’s pro guitar mode. Which I came at from a quite different background: my only prior guitar playing experience was a little fiddling around with an acoustic guitar one summer during college. So, while I knew of the existence of five or so chords, there are many many more chords that I don’t know, and scales and chord transitions are a complete mystery to me.

As with pro keys, however, touching the instrument and getting my hands oriented was central to my experience. This was clear as soon as I started pro guitar mode: I’d been used to plucking guitar strings, but the game does a lot better at detecting your playing if you use a pick (and that is, of course, much more common for the actual musical performances that are on disc), so that is what I did. And, at first, I had a very hard time just finding the different strings with my pick! In fact, jumping between strings still occasionally gives me trouble half a year into this experiment; it’s amazing how difficult such basic actions can be.

That’s just my right hand, but of course there’s a lot more room for things to go wrong on guitar with my left hand. And go wrong they did: I initially had no idea where my hand should be at any given time. (Incidentally, I think the game and instrument’s ability to give you feedback on your hand position before you strum without requiring you to look at your hand is a huge advantage for learners.) But this turned even the easiest, chord-free mode of pro guitar into a wonderfully tactile and tactical experience: I would be confronted with a sequence of notes, and while it’s possible to approach them in isolation, it’s a lot more interesting to figure out how to position your hand so that you’ll be able to play as many of the notes in a sequence as possible without moving your left hand up and down the fretboard, playing as economically as possible.

And, of course, as you move up the difficulty level, the game throws chords at you, which is its own special experience. Learning the shapes of different chords on their own, learning how to maintain proper pressure to get a good sound out of barre chords, learning how to place my fingers on a barred A chord so that I don’t inadvertently mute strings. Learning how to transition between different chords, first slowly and then quickly, trying to hit each chord in the sequence crisply and accurately. Having common chord transitions slowly seep into my subconscious, into my reflexes; having right hand difficulties return when I need to master alternating strumming. All of the knowledge that’s in my hands for keyboards, I have to recreate when playing guitar.

As I go through the pro guitar experience, I’m constantly impressed at the tools the game gives to train my hands: the multiple versions of each song teaching different techniques, the range of difficulties across songs, the training mode letting you focus on key sections of each song, the lessons teaching you different playing techniques. With micro goals everywhere, with an attainable goal always nearby for my hands to strive for.

Video games have such a strange relationship to touch. By all rights, touch should be central to the experience of video games: your hands on your controller is exactly what mediates your experience, what forms the bridge between the desire for action in your head and the electronic representations that are inside the software and hardware that make up the games.

Yet, somehow, touch rarely contributes to my experience of games. At best, controllers are ready-to-hand, an unnoticed link in the chain of translation of action between my thoughts and my avatar. At worst, they’re present-at-hand, serving to frustrate with their clumsiness, with their lack of fidelity.

Rock Band points at what more is possible. I suppose that, if forced to choose, I would prefer a musical instrument to be ready-to-hand rather than present-at-hand. But, to me, both of those concepts understate the importance of hands! I don’t want instruments to be invisible, I don’t want my hands to be invisible, I don’t consider either of them to be interfering with some sort of direct connection between my brain and expressions of concepts in the world. My hands are creative partners, I want them to contribute more rather than less, and I don’t want to sweep those contributions under the rug.

(Is that attitude a side-effect of where I am in the learning process? Do professional musicians’ hands vanish as they’re absorbed in the music? I doubt it, if only because of the vast number of hours they spend training those hands.)

Does this richness of physical interaction ever happen with traditional video games? For me, rarely. But, of course, Rock Band 3 has two huge advantages in that regard: it’s a game that I play obsessively, and it builds on physical interaction designs that have evolved over centuries. There’s not a lot that most video games can do about the latter; the former, however, is more promising. Yes, most video games are play-and-forget operations; but perhaps serious Starcraft players, serious Counter-Strike players feel that their hands guide them at times?

And, of course, despite my obsession, my hands don’t spend most of their time playing Rock Band: they spend most of their time typing. Which they are good at; not the same sort of experience, however. Though it gets a little closer once keyboard shortcuts get involved: using meta-period to elegantly assemble commands in bash, using refactoring keyboard shortcuts to rearrange code in IntelliJ.

I am grateful to Rock Band for its help in reminding me of the pleasures of my hands. (And, if I’m drumming or singing, the pleasures of my feet and throat! The latter deserves its own post, though.) Perhaps I should try out Dance Central next, to move that experience in from my extremities, towards the center of my body?

One song that stood out, however, was She’s Always A Woman. It’s full of chords and chord progressions, to be sure; but the chords are all arpeggiated, and the chord changes are relatively frequent. That (combined with the fact that the game only has you playing with your right hand, so you don’t have the grounding of the bass part) means that, while the chordal structure of the piece is on display, it’s hidden a little bit more than in the other pieces: you can feel it in your hands, but there’s an extra layer of artistry masking it.

I’d been looking for a finger picking piece to learn on the guitar, and I found a good candidate last week: a really lovely arrangement of 風の丘 (Kaze no Oka, which means something like Windy Hill) from Kiki’s Delivery Service. It’s everything that I was looking for: not just lovely to listen to, it also has distinct melody and bass lines, with arpeggiation relating the two.

These two pieces are both somewhat similar, with arpeggiation hiding underlying chordal structure. In 風の丘, you have the added benefit of the bass line grounding you, but the flip side is that the arpeggios aren’t as worked out and there are more purely melodic bits, so on the whole the structure is a bit more hidden.

Or maybe it’s just as obvious but I’m simply a much worse guitar player than piano player (that last part is unquestionably true), so my hands aren’t nearly as good at seeing the structure that’s there? Certainly it’s the case that trying to memorize 風の丘 is like pulling teeth: I’ll play a couple of measures, and by the time I’m done with the second measure I’ll have completely forgotten the notes that began the first one. Or at least that’s the case if I’m approaching the song as a collection of notes: if I can find a chord that’s a decent match for a half-measure, then I have a chance at being able to remember that half-measure the next time I play it.

Only a chance, though: I’m very bad at translating melodic relations between notes into places to put my finger on a guitar, frequently not even choosing the correct string. Also, for me, every guitar chord is an island, I just don’t have common chord progressions ingrained into my hands yet. I’m amazed at how much more easily I can pick out melodies on a violin than on a guitar: the technical challenge should be very similar indeed, and I’m certainly not a good violinist, but apparently those middle school orchestra years stuck with me more than I realized?

Anyways: programming. One of my favorite parts of programming is refactoring; which is a good thing, because I seem to unable to not spend a lot of time reworking legacy code! When it’s going well, refactoring can be magical, with latent the latent structure of the code being teased into visibility by your fingers.

And when I was playing She’s Always A Woman, my main thought was: why isn’t programming like this for me more often? That reaction is certainly a sign that I should step up my game more, really dive whole-heartedly into code and see what I can learn from reworking it.

I’m not sure that this is analogy between musical structure and programming structure is a particularly good one, but if we run with it, where does it lead us? One of the interesting things about She’s Always A Woman is that the structure isn’t completely obvious: there’s an extra level of arpeggiation on top of the chords. Should I try to imitate that while programming, getting close enough to the core structures so that they provide a solid foundation for my code, while masking them with an extra layer of artistry?

Or maybe I’m wrong in fixating on chords: maybe the arpeggiation itself should be thought of as an extra layer of structure, increasing the structural richness of the piece rather than hiding it? I’m fairly sure that my difficulties with 風の丘 support this interpretation, because while figuring out the best chord to match each half-measure has been a huge help, it’s clearly only a first step. In particular, the fact that I’m not comfortable with melody on the guitar, that I can’t play through scale after scale, is a significant hindrance.

Also, returning to chords: it’s not just chords that are important, it’s chord progressions, relationships between chords. Abstracting a bit, what this is pointing out is that patterns alone aren’t sufficient, you really want a pattern language to relate them.

(And: dissonance! Glorious, wonderful dissonance!)

Having written this, I still don’t know how much to make of this analogy, though the response I got from the eight-tweet version of this blog post suggests that I’m not the only person who is drawn to both sides of this discussion. Be that as it may, the next steps are clear: dive into the details, on both the musical side (memorizing 風の丘!) and the programming side, and I’ll be a better person when I come out the other end.

And I should listen to my hands.

Playing those different instruments in short succession brought home something that I hadn’t quite realized: my taste in music changes quite a bit depending on the instrument I’m playing. And it changes in a specific way: my Rock Band vocal avatar is gay (as will be no surprise to anybody who has heard me sing in game, I suspect), while my Rock Band guitar avatar is straight.

(Which, rereading the above, adds another interesting twist to my singing vocal harmonies with my wife this morning. I won’t dig into that here other than to be quietly amused, but I will also note that our most common Rock Band pairing is me on guitar, her on bass.)

My drummer, I’m not as sure about. It seems like he’s straight, but drums are an instrument that I’m not particularly comfortable with, and I wouldn’t be shocked if something unexpected unfolded as he became more confident.

And then there’s keyboards. The situation with keyboards is rather more complicated, mirroring the fact that my keyboard self is a significantly better musician than any of my other avatars. The strongest part of my keyboard self is rather more of a monk, and doesn’t actually get very much nourishment from playing Rock Band. But Rock Band helps bring out another part of my keyboard self, and that part is a gay man, albeit a gay man with more complex tastes than my vocal avatar.

At which point, a joke suggests itself: a monk with a double life as a gay man? I’m shocked, shocked to hear that. Which is a cheap joke, and an unkind one; and its implication in this context is if anything backwards. As an introvert, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to present a gay male face as a more socially acceptable mask for my monkish self, rather than vice-versa; and, indeed, that analogy works musically as well. (Don’t worry, Kirk, I know you’re kidding! Or at least you’d better be…)

But, in fact, neither of those two parts of my keyboard self is a mask for the other. Yes, I love fugues, but I love show tunes as well. The former love perhaps gets more to my core, or at least to more private parts of myself, but they are both part of who I am. One could make a case that there’s tension between the two; but if we’re talking about sex here, tension is what makes flirting fun. And, ultimately, both parts are comfortable with whom they are and their preferences, which is a healthy attitude towards sex as well.

I’ve been somewhat manic this last week; its been a fascinating experience, and hope I’ll eventually figure out more of what’s been going on there. In the meantime, though: the most interesting aspect is how theatrical I’ve been feeling. Aspects of me have been coming to the fore that are normally more hidden, and I’ve enjoyed displaying them. And, as with my twin keyboard selves, or indeed with all of my Rock Band avatars, these aren’t masks that my true self is lurking behind: they’re parts of me, just not parts of me that I’m as used to showing.

I’m glad to know those emerging parts of me a little better, and to be a little more fluent at using them as part of my outward face. But, of course, they’re not the only part of me, they’re not any more my true self than the part of me that’s a strong introvert, that needs to go off to think, to recharge. (To write blog posts!)

I am large, I contain multitudes. Fortunately, those multitudes turn out to be pleasant for me to spend time with.

The topic of the podcast was music games, which of course largely means Rock Band 3. And it was super fun to record! I apologize for the one bit at the end where I go off on a complete tangent: you can tell that my brain was working on that Apple post and decided to shoehorn it in there even though it was almost completely inappropriate to do so. Sometimes my brain does odd things…

The thing is, rock guitar is not the only type of guitar that I like to play: as Jordan will attest, there is another kind of song that I like to play on the guitar, and it’s called “Alice’s Restaurant”. Which, sadly, will never come to Rock Band 3, because the controller doesn’t work well with finger picking.

While that is unfortunate, I don’t have to limit my guitar playing to video game situations. It is, however, conceivable that there might be other songs that I might enjoy playing almost as much as Alice’s Restaurant, so I should consider broadening my repertoire a bit. Which raises the question: why do I like playing Alice’s Restaurant?

I think finger picking is part of the answer: not that strumming chords is a bad idea, but I like putting my individual fingers to work as well. Experimenting a bit, though, I don’t think it’s the entire answer: picking out arpeggios is pleasant enough, but not quite the same. I think what I really like about Alice’s Restaurant is the independent musical lines, picking out both (a stripped down version of) the melody and a bass line.

So what I’m really looking for are other pieces I can learn with (at least?) two voices. I’m not fussy about the details: clearly melody plus bass is fine, but two equal voices in counterpoint would also be great. (Heck, I might enjoy that more, given the nature of my musical background.)

Suggestions?

On easy, I was playing single notes; in chord sections, I had almost no context, and in solo sections I was missing the vast vast majority of the notes. On medium, the solo sections still aren’t particularly satisfying, but the chord sections have much more substance to them: in fact, on songs that have G, D, and C chords, you’re expected to play the full chords. (And it helped that the small amount of guitar learning that I’d done a couple of decades ago left me with some slight familiarity with those chords.) Of course, most of the songs on the disc are instead full of A and E chord shapes (typically barred), and there the game only has you play the two lowest strings of the chord; still, that’s enough to at least reinforce the fact that you’re not playing standalone notes, that chord progressions underpin the notes that you’re playing.

And the chords (and notes) come faster in medium than in easy, enough so that they took a bit of time to learn: once I got past the very easiest pieces, I went through training mode on every song, and I’m glad I did. My left hand had to shift more quickly and over longer distances than I was comfortable with, and even two-note chords required me to be surer in my transitions than the “move your hand and then correct” style that easy allowed me to use. Of course, my hand was generally in an unrealistic shape, because I didn’t try to pretend to play barre chords, and I may end up regretting that a little bit; though even there on some songs I actually found it easier to use a barre chord shape than to hit the two notes precisely.

I’m curious how many other people playing the game are taking my approach of going through everything on medium, versus the approach of focusing on individual songs and learning how to play them on hard (or even expert?) before moving on. I’m (barely) in the top 2% of pro guitar players in terms of total score, which I find ludicrous, and which I assume means that my approach of going through everything on medium isn’t very popular. (I also assume it means that I’m simply putting in more time, though I would imagine the price of the controller selects for people who at least intend to put in some amount of effort?) And if other people are focusing on individual songs to the extent that they actually sound decent playing those songs, more power to them: I’m looking forward to reaching that level myself, but I’m certainly not there yet.

But I’m not having second thoughts about my approach, either. I found the micro goals that playing on medium gives me to be very compelling: I’m not diving head-first into the game or anything, but I’ve put in three or four hours on pro guitar pretty much every weekend since I finished pro keys, and there’s something pleasant about spending twenty minutes with a song (involving training and a couple of playthroughs), feeling that I’ve had to deal with some challenges while doing so, and then moving on to another song. And I have absolutely no question that I’ve learned something over the last couple of months: my hands are much better at leaping between frets and strings than they were when I started this project, so while I’ve got a huge amount of work ahead of me, I don’t want to discount the progress that I’ve made it so far.

Having said that, I’m also very glad that I’m done with medium and about to hit hard, because my best guess is that this is where the game starts to get a whole lot more musical, in the sense that if I were to memorize the songs and play them without the game on, I would be recognizable as actually playing the songs in question. That’s just a guess, though: I haven’t played any songs on hard yet, all I’ve done is dipped into the barre chord lessons, made it through the first few with some difficulty (and some pain!), and ended up with a fair number of questions. (Fortunately, my twitter feed is blessed with a wealth of people named Dan who give great advice!) Because of the difficulties that I had there (including difficulties telling when I was holding down the strings firmly enough), I’ve actually put in a bit of guitar time every evening this week outside of game, with the controller unplugged and unmuted; the fact alone that I’m doing that makes me happy, and it seems to be paying off a bit.

We’ll see how much progress I’ll make this weekend; it would be nice if I could make it through all the barre chord lessons, though I imagine that (unlike all previous lessons in the game) I’ll end up returning to those even after I’ve passed them, in order to get to where I can pass them reliably. And I’ll probably dip into a real song once I’ve done that, though I’ll also give the rest of the hard level lessons a try; who knows what my progression pattern will be like when trying the hard songs. (I certainly don’t have confidence that I’ll be able to make it through all the songs on hard without more work than I’m willing to put in, but who knows.)

And I’m also going to try to actually learn some of the songs. I’m planning to buy a (cheap) amp, so I can hear better what I sound like; any recommendations? My neighbor gives guitar lessons, so I may see if I can sign up for a few one-off sessions with her as well. (Which I imagine will lead to some odd conversations: no, I don’t want to go through your standard lesson plan, I just want focused advice to answer questions X, Y, and Z that I can’t figure out the answer to when playing Rock Band!)

Great game, and to me it looks like a great teaching device. It’s giving me a lot of appreciation for the power of game mechanics in that context: having a set of focused challenges with a game infrastructure (including amplifying your actions to make it feel like you’re doing something much more impressive than you actually are) is working very well for me.

So, given my lack of luck and finding a pair that will work reliably, I thought I’d ask for help. Recommendations? Some things I’m thinking about:

• All things being equal, I would of course prefer ones that sound better. I realize that you can’t ask for too much out of earphones that live in my pocket, and I mostly listen to non-musical podcasts, so I’m not willing to pay a huge premium for better sound, but I don’t want the sound to be super-crappy, either.
• A built-in microphone for phone usage is nice but not essential: I’d pay somewhat more money for that, but I’m quite willing to consider ones without a mic.
• I’d be happy to spend more money on pairs that I had reason to believe would last longer: I’m more or less trying to minimize the total replacement cost per year of use, subject to the points above. Though the flip side is I’m not quite sure what evidence would convince me that a given pair of earphones would last more than three months or so!

Any suggestions? For what it’s worth, ones I’ve been using are: these V-MODA ones without a mic, these V-MODA ones with a mic, and Apple’s. All of which sounded acceptable, but none of which reliably lasts more than three months.

It’s been a very interesting experience. Some of that is what I talked about yesterday: I just don’t put in that sort of repeated focused practice in other video games, and I don’t think other games support that nearly as well as the Rock Band series does, Rock Band 3 in particular. And after years of doing not particularly well in competitive multiplayer video games with the VGHVI crowd (who, I assure you, are an extremely congenial bunch, I can’t imagine losing to nicer people!), I take a certain pleasure in having one mode in a game that I can point at and say that yes, I’m better at this than the vast majority of you. (As of this writing, I’m in 34th place on the overall Pro Keys leaderboard. Though I’m pretty sure that at least one person reading this blog is better at Pro Keys than I am…)

And watching the leaderboards has given me a glimpse into how this game appears different to people with different musical backgrounds: while my ranks on individual songs are all quite decent, they aren’t uniformly so. On some songs, I worked hard and still ended up with a rank in the two-hundreds, while there were other songs where I finished my first run through the song, felt that I’d done a kind of sloppy job, and was already up in the mid thirties. The pattern there seems to be what kind of playing the song requires: I don’t do so well on songs that require you to play the same notes over and over again quickly and precisely, while I can easily imagine somebody who is much better on Expert (non-pro) Guitar than I am will find that those skills transfer over to let them do well on such songs on Pro Keys. Whereas songs that require you to play through melodies and natural sequences of chord changes are ones that I can pull off without much thought at all: my hands know how to do that sort of stuff, no problem. (I knew that figured bass training would pay off eventually!)

When I first started Pro Keys, I found the notation a little bit frustrating, but I got the hang of it soon enough. And one of the realizations I had over the course of that process was that, if an interval was too wide for me to be able to read it at a glance, it was almost certainly an octave: that made certain songs a lot easier for me to play. But, dense as I am, it took me a while to realize the following: that’s very useful for me, because my hand has decades of experience in exactly how wide an octave is, but it’s a lot less useful to somebody who is coming at the game without a keyboard background! And octaves are only scratching the surface: my hand also knows what all sorts of triads feel like, including their various inversions and the combinations of black and white notes that show up in different keys. I have a huge amount of respect for anybody who has made it through the expert songs without a piano background: you (and your hands!) have learned a lot in that process. (My hands have learned something in the process, too: I would seem to be better at playing fast arpeggios with a reasonably even rhythm than I was before I survived Antibodies and Roundabout.)

So now I’m definitely a supporter of the notation that the game uses for notes. It’s obvious what the notation means, and the color divisions make sense on both a musical and a tactile level. It’s still not nearly as second nature to me as standard musical notation is (in particular, I seem to do most of my positioning by comparing the relative location of new notes to earlier notes, combined with knowledge of what makes sense musically, instead of directly translating a note on screen to an absolute position on the keyboard), but I can’t remember the last time when I had to look down at the keyboard when playing, so the notation is more than good enough.

Or at least it’s more than good enough within the constraints of the game. A two octave keyboard is a huge improvement over five buttons, but it’s too small to play all but the simplest of real songs; what’s worse, you’re never playing more than an octave at any given moment. So you play through the whole game with one hand, and while I suppose it’s convenient to have a hand free to activate overdrive, it’s very stripped down compared to real piano playing. (And, I suspect, compared to real keyboard playing in a rock band, though I don’t have any experience with that.) My guess is that the distance between Pro Keys and playing on a real instrument is significantly larger than on Pro Guitar or (probably) Pro Drums, though I could be wrong about that as well. I would love it if Rock Band 4 could have a much more serious Pro Keys mode, though it’s not at all obvious to me how to do that while working within the confines of the screen and without falling back to standard musical notation; then again, if anybody can come up with a way to cross that gap, it’s Harmonix. And, of course, I’d be perfectly happy with a mode that gave standard musical notation while letting me use both hands, though that would shrink the potential audience even more: as is, I’m somewhat worried that Harmonix is on the wrong side of an Innovator’s Dilemma slope.

But if they’re on the wrong side of that slope, it’s because they’re adapting their game more and more to players like me. Good times.

I was going to write a long blog post about how special this sort of focused practice in games is, but then I realized that I’d already done so. But since blog posts have a way of being forgotten quickly (even by their authors, it would seem!), I’ll just repeat the ideas here. The game is providing me with a short but meaningful challenge: meaningful in the sense that I have to work a bit to succeed at the challenge, and also meaningful in the sense that, by succeeding at the challenge, I’ll also gain something else that matters to me. (Listening to music, and learning something about the music while doing so.) The challenge is surprisingly rich, containing quite a bit more “depth on demand” (as Randy Smith puts it) than is apparent on the surface: I can decide whether or not I want to look at my hands, I can decide how much I want to think about where my hands should go, I can decide how much to think about the underlying musical issues that inform the challenge, I can decide whether my goal is to finish the song with no fail on, to finish it with no fail off, to finish it with five stars, to full combo it, to do better than my friends who are also playing the game (answer: no, given that Dan Bruno is on my Xbox Live friends list!). The challenge spans a single song, so is over in less than five minutes and can be repeated several times without trying my patience should I so choose; but that challenge is one of seventy-odd songs in the game in a carefully graded progression difficulty, and I have three more tiers of increasing difficulty coming from increasing inherent richness waiting for me once I’m done with those songs.

That is wonderful.

And also rarer than it should be. Some of which is my fault: if I spent more time playing multiplayer FPSes or fighting games, I would see more such focused challenges. They wouldn’t be crafted nearly as well towards my practice, towards improving my craft as Rock Band manages; but those genres also allow improvisation and creation far beyond Rock Band, which is a huge strength. (Hmm, maybe I should spend more time placing racing games: mastering a track provides a focused challenge, while the other racers provide unexpected stimuli to react to.) But I’d love to see a competitive game that comes with a series of prescriptive katas to help hone your skills for use in subsequent improvisation. (Or at least I think I’d love it: I’m not sure I’ve jumped at the learning modes (“virtual reality missions” and the like) in games that have tried to provide them. I did like the graded bot challenges in Perfect Dark, though…)

But it’s not all my fault. Too many games throw repetition at you for the sake of repetition, typically using the promise of narrative advancement as a lure to get you to put up with the repetition of the challenges. (And, sadly, the narrative is as threadbare as the challenge, more often as not: super wonder meh twins unite!) Admittedly, I could change my approach towards such games—when confronted with narrative games, I tend to dial down the difficulty level rather than embrace the challenges at the expense of prolonging my progress through the narrative—but there’s no need for games to force me to make that tradeoff, or to present me with two unsatisfactory choices rather than two tantalizing choices.

And I do need to improve my skills for thinking and talking about challenges in games. One of my favorite parts of working at Playdom was having excuse to play board games every week (with really fascinating company): those games focus much more on their mechanics, they’re fascinating, but I haven’t talked about them here as well. One of my favorite games over the last year was Flight Control HD, and right now I’m going through Tiny Wings: again, both focus on the mechanics, and Tiny Wings also does a rather good job of giving you focused challenges to help you see more of the ramifications of those mechanics. If that’s what we’ll find in this new world of cheap iOS games, then there’s a lot of good to be found there.

But also a lot of good to be found beyond there. Just put together the focused learning of Rock Band 3‘s pro modes with the improvisational possibilities of our best competitive games, and find a way somehow to couple that with narrative that reinforces and is reinforced by the mechanics. And do it all while mercilessly removing padding. That’s not too much to ask for, is it?

All the Pro Guitar posts should be under the tag “pro guitar“—WordPress even automatically generates an RSS feed for the tag should you be interested.

9:30am–10:30am: “The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport”, by Dustin Browder

2005. Dawn of War just shipped: 4 sides, 63+ units, with more to come. Supreme Commander about to ship: 4 sides 100+ units. Starcraft 2 planned with 3 sides, 45 units. (Some of which are effectively identical!)

This sounded crazy to him: units = choices = gameplay = fun. They need more!

The response: this is an e-sport. That’s new, hard to do. Think of this as “basketball 2″. That means it needs to be: watchable: clear, simple, skill-based, uncertain.

Let’s drill down into these. “Clear” is why the artists hate him. He gives an example of an ultralisk: it’s not nearly as impressive as it could be, it would look a lot better if it were bigger. But if he did that, it would hide smaller units (he showed it hiding 20 zerglings), destroying clarity/readability. Especially important in the case of effects: you don’t want them making an imprecise light show all over the screen, you want to know exactly who is affected and whether it succeeded. 

Simple: minimum number of units. For Starcraft, 12-15 units per race. Too many and viewers are confused, pros have to guess, and some units end up functioning as reskins. But: you still need tons of choices with that small number of units. They started by just experimenting with movers and shooters, fiddling with the stats to bring out differences. (Including area of influence, how they move.)

Interlude on upgrades. Banelings are better than marines; but marines + stim are better than marines. So upgrades don’t just make a unit more like itself, they flip relationships. (And that relationship can get flipped again with a handling upgrade.) Or the roach can be upgraded in two different ways: 1 unit, 3 uses.

Skill: micromanagement is important to them. It’s part of the game: an RTS isn’t just a really fast turn-based game. (Also, micromanagement is fun to watch, important for a sport!) And it allows for degrees of skill, degrees of success/failure. Force field example: easy to use it at a choke point; hard to use it to protect a group on the field; still harder to use it to split an opponent force. (And you can do any of these better or worse: a better player won’t leave as many gaps between force fields.)

(Flanking and terrain examples that I didn’t quite understand)

Uncertainty: that’s why the Zerg rush is there. Anything is possible in the first few minutes of the game. A rush is always going to be possible at some point in the game: so why push out the possibility away from the start?

Those are the core values; now on to ripple effects.

Story: as discussed above, units on screen are smaller than would be ideal for narrative purposes. So they exaggerate in the other direction in story art, so you’ll be able to imagine how cool the units are. Similarly, units are tiny ants on the battlefield, so make them over-the-top characters in story mode.

Solo tech: they had cool, fun units, but they overlapped with other units. So they weren’t suitable for e-sport usage, but still valuable content.

Missions: the narrative arc for the e-sport is exposition (scouting), complication (early battles), climax (deciding battle), resolution (gg, post-game analysis). With single player, though, it didn’t work the same way: a real cost to losing an individual battle, so players would play defensively until they had an overwhelming advantage, at which point there would be a long mop-up period. So they added in lots of different mechanics to the single-player game, to shift the narrative arc. E.g. outbreak: night = terror, day = payback. (Still too much mop-up, though.)

11:00am–12:00pm: “Hybrid Orchestration – Scoring Need for Speed“, by Troels Folmann and Charles Deenen

They’re talking about Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed.

Charles started:

Development wants cinematic Gladiator-liked score. Marketing wants youth-relevant licensed songs. Traditionally, you separate these two; they decided to merge them into a single hybrid score. Take very popular tracks, reorchestrate / rescore them.

Different music styles: epic = driver’s win, dirty = battle, two others that I didn’t catch in time. (Surreal = preparation, I think, and then special purpose for full-motion-video?)

They did a concept with a single 30 Seconds to Mars track; worked surprisingly well. So let’s go with it! But required signoffs from lots of different people; and its a huge amount of work even with the bare minimum of 10 songs. And very tight pipeline, with serious risk of having signoffs denied late in the process.

They decided to start with a test bed to get early approval from one of the bands, to reduce risk. They had different composers produce sample orchestrations in the different styles, to see what would work. (Same audio tracks, but everything else was different.) Made about 20; sent top 7-8 to band.

And, fortunately, the band really liked it! Kept feeling of the song while reinterpreting it in really cool ways. This helped convince execs and other bands, too. (Eventually, all 10 targeted bands signed off.)

Now Troels speaking:

The Four Noble Truths: everything is suffering, suffering arises from attachment to desires, … (Ed.: one of the more unexpected slides I’ve seen in a GDC presentation.)

And: what does “hybrid” mean? One important consequence: don’t follow a traditional song structure; this is hard! Also, refine concepts: epic alone isn’t good enough: need epic clean, epic emotion. So a specific hybridization for this project.

(Previous example: mismatch between sound, game. Kill your darlings, listen to client / game. Surprised he was invited back.)

Created a template for this hybridization. Focused on percussive elements, also mention of strings and brass that I didn’t understand. (And what is “RMX and deep-sampled percussion”?) Ethnic choirs, custom signature samples.

First example: “Night of the Hunter” by 30 Seconds to Mars. Showed various refinements, …

Second: “Issues”, Escape the Fate. Lots of revisions. What’s the right number of revisions? 7 was definitely too much.

So he hit the wall. How to overcome this? Communicate; find personal joy; make mockups; face the wall; ignore the wall. Took the last strategy: took three days off completely. Sat in his garden, recorded bees, turned them into different songs. (Hi-hat, Hammond, …) Made a pretty amazing video out of it. Also tried various objects: crowbar, light bulbs, coffee pot, playground poles.

Third: “Take a Load Off”, Stone Temple Pilots. Went a lot faster this time, only a few revisions.

Fourth: (unreleased song) 7 revisions, but all small, so not a big deal.

Back to Charles.

Postproduction. Increased clarity, better instrument and frequency separation, more TV-friendly sound, even composer agreed it was worth it.

Post-mortem: how to approach hybrid? Create template, ensure everything connects textually, identify signature sounds, identify rhythmic elements that merge with orchestral and synth elements.

12:30pm–1:30pm: “The Game Design Challenge 2011: Bigger than Jesus”, by John Romero, Jason Rohrer, Eric Zimmerman, and Jenova Chen

Eric Zimmerman (moderator). For this year’s theme, he wanted to merge games and religion: create a game that could be a religion. (Not about religion: the game itself and the act of playing should be a religion.)

Jason Rohrer

Chain World: A humanistic video game religion that someone will play today. Religions used to try to explain physical mysteries; that role has been usurped by science and technology recently. He talks about a detour that I-77 had to take around a town in Ohio because of a fight his grandfather led. Talks more about visiting that town, about things his grandfather allegedly said. Lots of details about his grandfather that he doesn’t really know whether or not they’re true: his grandfather is turning more into a saint-like figure. We become like gods to those who come after us.

His game idea: you control a world, then pass it on to the next player. Game designer is god, he passes the start state to the player, leading to an end state. But what if your end states somebody else’s start state? Each player is like a god to the next.

You want to do this in a game where modifications don’t screw up the playing field for the next player. (So not like Mario, where you modify the world by destroying blocks.) Players might have intent for how they want to modify the world for the next player; players might wonder what the previous player intended with an aspect of the world.

That’s the frame idea; what’s the actual game? Minecraft! A specific world on a specific USB stick. Play the game, don’t erect signs with text, play until you die. Save, pass it on, never play again.

John Romero

What is a religion? Deity, worshippers, devotion. In the beginning, there were lots of gods, one true god emerged @God6502; he had a son @Messiah6502. Follow him on Twitter: first twelve followers are his apostles. They come down to the front of the room; quite a distinguished bunch. Each gets a pad of sticky notes, to gather followers.

The winner: the apostle with the most miracles: some of the sticky notes have star markers. (@SquirrelTweets) But: to win the game, you must kill him, John Romero. (Doom image.)

Jenova Chen

Here are his slides.

He’s Chinese, so supposed to be an atheist. Did lots of research. Chinese believe in gods, but not the same sort of belief that you see in modern religions: a god is an unknown, a value. Dao = way of life, how to live. Recent China: socialism, then developmentism, then consumerism. These three are all about being happy, which seems fairly fundamental. Or: belief in something bigger.

Inspiration: Campbell, Csíkszentmihályi, Darwin.

What drives happiness? Money is useful at first, but beyond a certain level more money is irrelevant. Hierarchy of needs: top is self-actualization, not addressed by money.

At the end of the hero’s journey, he returns, giving something back to the community.

What is our purpose? He wants one that works for primitive humans, even for nonhumans. Circle of life: propagation is the more interesting part. These days, propagation of ideas is more important.

But what ideas should we propagate? Evolution says: look at the ones that survive, refine them. How does selection happen? Unknown: god. (Editorial note: not really, no…)

TED: Ideas worth spreading. But they’re not good game designers: the website is very passive, even the slogan is. TED: Influence with your ideas. No ranking for videos: rank by view count, or better by number of people inspired by them. Give each video a page, showing whom you’re influencing. Twitter follower count, badges in a Chinese twitter-like site.

Badges alone aren’t a game: you need a feedback loop. So: badges / points lead to promotion system that help draw other people to watch your video.

Propagationism.

(Rohrer won.)

2:00pm–3:00pm: “An Apology for Roger Ebert”, by Brian Moriarty

(Here’s the text of Moriarty’s talk.)

“I am, in fact, Professor Moriarty.” This is an apology not in the sense of anything done wrong, but in the sense of a defense.

(Discussion of 2005 Ebert article, 2010 flaring up of the argument.)

Why return to this? He wants to discuss Ebert’s claim that there isn’t a game worth of comparison with the treasures of world literature, movies, music, paintings.

Discussion of painting: Northcote, Chess Players, c1730. Two chess players: the game industry, self absorbed, satisfied. The golden boy is art itself, looking at us, pointing at a paper containing his secrets.

Read lots of art history; never saw games mentioned as art. (Ed. Nobody stood up for go? Oy.) Math is elegant, but nobody confuses mathematics with art, they’re different categories! Considering games as art is radical; then again, the idea of great works of art is also radical, only 500 years old.

Photography, movies entered realms of art relatively recently; why shouldn’t video games? Because games are old: if chess and go aren’t art, why should video games be?

Interlude: we know what video games are. But we don’t know how to define art, let alone great art. C.f. Duchamp urinal. Also, games can clearly contain great art from other media. But that’s not enough: mechanics and affordances are key. Can mechanics and affordances be considered art?

(Taste, intersubjectivity. Not all movies are Art.)

Eliciting emotion isn’t enough for art. Art is about attraction. (Ed. really??) But how to distinguish sublime art?

Kitsch. Is it art? Somebody claims: yes, art with three characteristics. Highly charged with stock emotions. Instantly and effortlessly recognizable. Does not enrich our associations. Nearly all popular art is kitsch. (Bombast: all adaptations are kitsch? Oy.)

More on games as kitsch, whee.

Celebration of kitsch = camp. Ultimately an evasive strategy.

Big studios won’t make art. Indies won’t. Who will make art? Those who would make art anyways: the artists. Warning: don’t just follow the trappings, then you’ll get something arty.

Technology of film largely stable for more than 100 years.

Structural reasons why games won’t produce sublime art. Ebert talks about direction of artist, inevitability of meaning. (Oy.) Romantic point of view. Schopenhauer: free will and individual choice are illusions, desire a prison. Leap off the wheel of desire via the contemplation of sublime art. Transcends will, frees us from agony of contingency and causality.

“Flow is an an-aesthetic.”

If the purpose of sublime art is to solve the mystery of choice, then …

Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible.

All sublime art is devotional.

Edit: I thought Emily Short’s discussion of this talk was quite good.

3:30pm–4:30pm: “Message Queuing on a Large Scale: IMVU’s Stateful Event Architecture”, by Jon Watte

His slides:

Want: any-to-any messaging with ad-hoc structure. Lightweight (in-memory) state maintenance. Added queues as a building block, with two kinds of messaging: events and states. Integrated into a bigger system.

User to queue: connect, listen, send. Queue to game server: validate users/requests, notification. Game server to queue (didn’t catch it).

Design goal of 1M simultaneous users. (10x current use.) Real-time, meaning 100ms end-to-end. 20M queue creations/day.

Existing solutions didn’t work. (Wished they could buy Gtalk, AIM, etc. solutions!) Inspired by mochiweb: 1M users on a single machine, written in Erlang.

Implementation.

(Journey of a Message diagram: send to queue, validate, forward to other users listening to queue.)

Queue: multiple mounts (chat – message; scores – state; subscriber list).

One machine isn’t enough: doing some math on volumes and memory speed, would take over 3 seconds per message. So need to scale across machines.

Scale in two dimensions: gateway machines and queue machines, connected via a consistent hashing mechanism that allows moving chunks of queues via a central map of buckets to nodes.

Erlang. I’ll skip the details, but: basically, custom designed to solve their problem.

(Dozed off some: load balancing; marshaling via protocol buffers.)

Have a boss node keeping track of what gateway, queue nodes are doing. Looks like a single point of failure, but things keep running without it, you just can’t add more nodes until the boss is restarted.

Message could go out via a different node than where it entered; led to time skew. So sent messages out via entry node.

Hot add node diagram: make sure to forward messages while move is in process.

Problem cases. User goes silent; detect via ping. Reconnection of user, possibly to a different gateway: user-specific queue arbitrates. Node crashes (yet to happen in production, go Erlang!): state is ephemeral, user might get logged out. Gateway crashes: client reconnects, gets resent missed updates, application above queue API doesn’t notice. Sometimes want reliable messages; higher level API stores it in database. Firewalls: use proprietary protocol on port 80/443.

Build and test. Continuous integration, continuous deployment. Erlang supports in-place code updates, but too heavy for them; use failover instead.

Future: replication; scalability limits; open source what they can.

The slides are available online.

In 2008: music games were a big thing, needed to innovate.

Harmonix has this idea of The One Question that they focus work on a game around. For Guitar Hero: is it rock? Rock Band: is it an authentic band experience? Rock Band 3: used the same question, but make it more authentic. Which leads to: pro guitar, have people play on a real guitar, really learn how to play!

First, 3 months of early exploration. Question: is the problem space to teach people how to play guitar, or to pay RB with a real guitar? These don’t actually intersect that much. Target audience: hard/expert RB guitar player.

Use the illusion: mute/unmute the sound of real tracks, so the first time you get it right it sounds great. This is very unlike learning to play on a normal guitar, where you sound awful for a long time.

How to notate frets and strings? First idea: fret relative. Columns represent frets, represent strings some other way. Didn’t work so well, so tried having columns represent strings. Worked a little better, still issues to work out.

And some early constraints. It had to: display notes, chords; be pitch accurate; target non-musician RB players. It didn’t have to: work with bass; work with all songs; work in all game modes.

This was enough to give them something to work with when they had time, and to assemble a small strike team. Benefits: implementers make decisions. Focused meetings. Seating proximity. 

How they prototyped. No good hardware solutions: cost, latency, accuracy problems. Do whatever works best for now, use info to inform later decisions.

Question: how to communicate what to play? Approach: focus on building muscle memory, not music theory. Traditional notation good for conductors, highly compressed (e.g. key signatures). Guitar players use tablature instead: physically centered. But it has more problems: doesn’t work well with chords, rhythms. Third possibility is chord charts, but only works well with chords.

Need something else. The notation should be physically centered, compressed enough to be recognizable at a glance, work with time.

Different chords have different shapes on your hand. Can play same shape at multiple places on fret board, how to represent that? Also, what about riffs, loose strumming, arpeggios? All opportunities for compression.

So: new notation system, string relative. Should it be horizontal or vertical? All music notation is horizontal, so it must be better. First version could work either way; they found horizontal moved too fast, hard to represent shapes. So vertical was better.

Song selection for early prototypes. Did songs that would definitely work, e.g. I Love Rock and Roll. Also simplifies early prototyping if doing a 3-chord song!

Next questions: how teach chord shape? What info do they need to understand what to do with their hand? What else do they need to know?

First idea: inline training into songs. Really jarring, though. Next idea: chord book. Tried virtual hand, but players didn’t look at that. Players just need to know what they need to do and what they’re doing wrong.

Added in a “wait mode”: when learning a part in real life, you pause periodically while figuring out what to do next. So they’d do the same thing, where the game would pause while you put your fingers in the right place.

They play tested with various internal groups: little musical experience, lots of musical experience, little guitar experience, lots. Asked how fun it was; players weren’t sure that was the right question, but they persevered.

Big question that playtesters had: what is their left hand actually doing? So they wanted to show the shape hand was actually in.

Still problems: upfront learning, complex chords, screen real-estate, not all songs work well. Won’t be able to solve all of this, but wanted to chip away.

Had done enough to inform hardware requirements: need to know what left hand is doing, need low latency, need low cost. Ideal is actual guitar, but that has problems: never been done, could be expensive, strings break. So maybe plastic guitar approach? Decided to pursue both approaches, and ended up shipping both. 

Prototyping suggestions: reduce team size as much as possible. If an idea / issue keeps on coming up, you need to try it. Don’t skimp on low-hanging fruit.

Cycle: establish core goals and constraints, hack it in, playtest, repeat.

Prototyping took 7 months; on to production. (Which took 13 months.) They were confident coming out of prototyping, decided to raise the stakes. Do it in every song, every mode; anybody can learn easy, every note is in expert. Training on all song on all four difficulty levels, plus bonus music training.

Still need to figure out: standard RB stuff (hopos, solos, …), advanced song techniques, song authoring.

Problem 1: hardware. No MIDI drivers. Seven bridge modules to translate from MIDI to Xbox. Eventually got 7 of the plastic controllers, 3 of the real ones.

Problem 2: late content. Don’t pick all of final setlist until shortly before shipping. Decided to pick snippets of famous songs, to shake out issues. Famous songs, songs that should work well, songs that would stress the system.

Authoring solidifies: easy, medium, hard, expert guidelines. (medium simple chords, hard still parseable in real time.) And 17- vs 22-fret guidelines.

Worked on general theory lessons, too.

Prototype to production took a lot longer than expected.

Problem 3: slow progress. Increased team size, so no shared history. Needed more external focus.

Got back on track: refocused on target audience. Switched to short-term deadlines.  Pulled playtest dates forward to expose problems sooner.

Playtest revealed lots of little issues, and the chord book wasn’t working as well as they’d hoped. But a lot of things worked well; if they could nail those, they’d work well with their core audience, move on to more advanced stuff.

Added numbers to hand shape; pulled chord learning into songs. Then that gave them time to implement a lot of wishlist items.

I asked about the lack out auditory feedback for mistakes. They thought about it a lot, but decided that preserving the illusion was so important that they wouldn’t even allow it as an option.

Rock Band 3‘s signature song is Bohemian Rhapsody; and, as a video game, that song is a very odd experience indeed. Unless you’re singing, you spend large portions of the song waiting for your next chance to play; whether or not you’re singing, the style and difficulty vary wildly from section to section.

This is a huge change of pace from most games I’ve played recently. Yes, video games frequently involve standing around, in the form of cut scenes: but those are short compared to the action sections and are in a different mode, whereas the gaps in Bohemian Rhapsody are fairly long and are of a piece with the rest—indeed, you would be playing during them if you’d chosen a different instrument. And, while games move you from region to region, they do that on level boundaries: you’ll typically spend an hour or more in a given context and, outside of platformers, different levels in a single game typically have quite a bit more in common than the different sections of Bohemian Rhapsody. And Bohemian Rhapsody’s difficulty curve spiky graph would be completely out of place in any game that I can think of.

The thing is, none of this matters! Or rather, it matters, but in a good way, in that these comparisons completely miss the point of the virtues of playing the song. The song has a (quite!) distinctive vision, and the goal of playing through one of the instruments in the song isn’t to go through a checklist of what makes a game-playing experience pleasant (or, for that matter, what makes a musical experience pleasant), it’s to experience a portion of that vision.

I don’t want to throw away traditional guidelines for what makes a video game experience enjoyable, what makes a video game well crafted: I enjoy the sort of refined experience that is produced by years of thoughtful evolution as much as the next person, and I would find it exhausting if all games were as idiosyncratic as Bohemian Rhapsody. Having said that, the game that I played in 2010 that is rattling around in my brain the most is Killer 7, and for much the same reasons: it presents an experience that is quite different from anything else I’ve ever played, and that experience is a powerful one that I still don’t know how to make sense of. If you’d asked me what sort of characteristics an enjoyable action game would have, being on rails would be very low on my list; but that sort of checklist comparison is completely overwhelmed by the vision that illuminates Killer 7, and I’m more than happy to place myself in the light of that vision and see where it leads me.

By all means, refine your craft, and don’t put barriers in your users’ way out of carelessness. But listen to what emerges during the night, and if those visions lead you somewhere unusual, embrace them.