At any rate, as soon as I stepped into the entry area to Rapture and heard a slightly scratchy rendition of Beyond the Sea, I was hooked. The musical selections really are wonderful—I was going to write that it’s the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps the most with my iPod, until I realized that was patently false, but it’s right up there, and it’s definitely the game I own whose soundtrack overlaps most with the music sitting on top of my piano. And the music is just one aspect of the wonderfully nostalgic world they’ve created: I love the industrial design, the signs and artifacts that are sprinkled about. My only quibble is that the sequences of rooms often didn’t seem to fit together as a coherent three-dimensional chunk, but I can’t think of a first-person shooter that’s handled that better.

Very nice gameplay, too: I don’t like FPSes in general, and I was a bit worried that I’d be paralyzed by the choice of different plasmids; the latter didn’t happen, though, and I rather enjoyed some of the alternative gameplay mechanisms. (I’m a sucker for picture taking as a game mechanism, and the hacking minigame was pleasant enough.) And I appreciated some of the thoughtful choices the game made, e.g. not allowing me to waste my film taking pictures of enemies whose research I’d already maxed out, instead of treating film as an ammo like any other.

I could go into more detail about all of that, but, as with so many other people, all I really want to talk about is the Little Sisters. When I first heard about them and saw pictures of them in the prerelease coverage of the game (back when I actually paid attention to prerelease coverage of games!), they freaked me out enough that I wasn’t sure I would be able to play the game at all. I’m largely inured to video game violence, but for whatever reason (perhaps because I have a daughter myself, who was 7 or 8 years old at the time), those pictures really hit home, and I was not at all looking forward to playing through a game with such imagery in it.

I eventually came around, and I’m glad I did. But, with that as my initial impression of the game, the thought of harvesting Little Sisters never crossed my mind. In general, I’m not very good at appreciating “moral dilemmas” in video games (sorry, BioWare), because, given a choice, I can rarely imagine following one of the options. And this game would be an example, except that there’s a third, covert choice here.

Consider: I’ve been thrust into an extremely dangerous and extremely strange world. Almost everybody I meet seems to want to kill me; there’s a voice on the radio acting nice enough, but those I encounter in the flesh are rather less pleasant. And, in the middle of all of this, there are these strange little girls, with “Big Daddies” hulking nearby; neither of them wants to hurt me, the Big Daddies protect the girls, and the girls are evidently quite fond of the Big Daddies. (Or of “Mr. Bubbles”, as they call them.)

Given this, what kind of person would kill the Big Daddies? The main answer, I think, is a psychopath: either somebody who is so amoral as not to care, or so afflicted with a sort of white man’s burden megalomania as to think they can march in and set things to right. (Without doing any of the real work that is actually involved in looking after young children in even a normal environment, let alone a murderous one.) But somehow, in this game, killing their protectors and leaving the girls with nobody to guard and care for them in a place like Rapture is supposed to be the good choice?

I assume that the game designers had some uncomfortable thoughts along the same lines, because of the way they structured the first Little Sister encounter. In that one, the Big Daddy is already dead, and you have to save the Little Sister from a splicer yourself. After which, you meet Tenenbaum for the first time; she makes a case that “rescuing” the little sisters is good for them, but does so in a context that paints her as an unreliable narrator.

Given this, using the magic device Tenenbaum has given you that is supposed to cure the Little Sisters is horrifically irresponsible at best; and, even if you’re tempted to do so, not stopping when the girl cries out in horror is, well, beyond my powers to describe. I felt intensely uncomfortable, but of course the game doesn’t give you a chance to stop when she complains. (Incidentally, when rescuing Little Sisters here and over the course of the game, l Iearned something about how I act when I’m uncomfortable: every single time I rescued a Little Sister and heard those protests, I raised my left arm and scratched the back of my head. What a bizarre tic, I’m not sure I wanted to learn of its existence.) Stopping when confronted with the choice would have been conceivable, but I’m almost positive that the game wouldn’t have let me continue without doing something to the first Little Sister. (And, in the extremely unlikely case that it would have let me proceed, I’m also sure it wouldn’t have let me actually look after her.)

And, once you’ve rescued the first Little Sister, she thanks you, setting you on the slope to further evil: the next time you meet one, she’s with her Big Daddy, but you can rationalize (given all the other murder you’re committing in the game) killing her protector, because the end result is for her own good, right? (It is, of course, for your own good, but we’ll have to construct some sort of rationalization that goes beyond that.) Which I dutifully did because the game expected that of me—given that I wasn’t going to stop playing the game, I decided to go along with its design—but doing so broke my heart every time. (As did seeing a Big Daddy alone later on in that same level—in retrospect, watching a video, it wasn’t the Big Daddy protecting the first Little Sister I’d rescued, but that’s how I interpreted it at the time. Even if you accept that rescuing the Little Sisters is best for them, how can you justify killing their surrogate fathers while doing so?) Unlike with the first Little Sister I assume that it is possible to avoid killing any of the later Big Daddies; if I were more given to alternative playthrough styles, trying the game that way would be very high on my list.

A powerful game, and a very good one. Though also, in its own way a very depressing one: it’s one of the pinnacles of our art form, but it devotes most of its art to exploring adolescent Randian power fantasies instead of, say, exploring a topic like what it means to be a parent. (And that final movie shows just how paint-by-numbers the game designers’ basic approach in that area seems to be.) Sigh. Maybe I should come around to Chris Hyde’s point of view and turn more of my attention elsewhere.

If there’s a game I’ve played more this decade, though, I don’t know what it is.

Which got me wondering: what differences are our conceptions of video game genre blinding us to? What are the video games that we think of as being part of the same genre (because of their shared mechanics), while cutting across quite different areas of the theme and design space in ways other than their mechanics?

I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the Beatles game. Which I adore, as do many others; some people, however, even people who are as big Rock Band fans as I am, are less impressed. It generally comes down to the Beatles’ music not being to their taste; if you combine that with the gameplay being in many ways identical to earlier Rock Band iterations, then of course you’d prefer the wider musical variety in the earlier games.

Having said that, however, The Beatles: Rock Band isn’t quite the same as a reskinned Rock Band 2. Some differences:

• The songs are (almost) all unlocked from the beginning.
• Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t unlockables: you can unlock pictures and other historical artifacts.
• If you play through the game in its story-based mode, you encounter the songs in chronological order rather than a difficulty-based order.
• There are fewer ways in which your play affect the music that is played. (E.g. no drum free play to activate star power.)
• On the easiest setting (which is the default), you can’t fail out of a song.
• You can’t customize your avatar.
• Each song has custom artwork, custom animations.

And these are not random differences or a collection of isolated refinements: they all point in the direction of moving the game away from focusing on players’ generic mastery of techniques and towards a focus on the Beatles’ music and their surrounding history. I’ll even claim that the game’s achievements show this difference: the achievements have moved away from generic gameplay accomplishments and towards achievements that get you focusing on individual songs, and even on techniques within those songs. (I’m thinking of the hammer-on/pull-off achievements for Dear Prudence and Octopus’s Garden; or the achievements for double-fab and triple-fab singing, which will lead you to appreciate just how differently the harmonies play out in different songs.)

The picture that I’m getting from this is a game that, on a non-mechanics genre level, is profoundly different from the vast majority of video games. At its core, the Beatles game is a non-fiction game in the sense that most video games are fiction games: while the game certainly takes its liberties with the historical material that it’s presenting, it’s easy to imagine reaching the game by starting from a book about the Beatles or a course about the Beatles, and dreaming about how to make it more interactive, more immersive, enabling the learner to view the music from different perspectives and to isolate different aspects of their music. (I’m not the only person who appreciates Paul McCartney’s bass lines a lot more after going through the game on bass than I did before playing it.) I’ve been hearing about the Serious Games movement for years; in its own way, this game is one of the best examples of a serious game that I can think of.

Having written the above, now that I’ve had my eyes opened to the nonfiction nature of the Beatles game, I think that other Rock Band games actually largely fit within the nonfiction space as well: they’re much more of a representation and exploration of externally constructed subjects than (to pick another game within the rhythm game genre) Space Channel 5 is. I think it took the kick of a game saying “no, we’re not going to organize the game’s progression in terms difficulty” to open my eyes to non-fiction video games that surround me, but now that my eyes are opened, I see them there.

Or maybe they don’t surround me, actually—looking at my game shelf, Wii Fit, the Brain Age games, and (I suspect, I haven’t played it) Endless Ocean qualify, but not much else. So maybe what’s really going on here is that two companies, Nintendo and Harmonix, are doing something special; five or ten years from now we’ll look back and marvel at the changes in the possibilities that games represent that are getting their first big market successes right now. (Yes, I am aware that non-fiction games have been around for quite some time; I had a lot of fun playing Robot Odyssey a quarter-decade ago!)

Of course, everybody’s aware of what Nintendo is doing in this vein (it’s certainly hard to ignore Wii Fit); Harmonix’s efforts are, to me, going underappreciated. I’m very excited about the possibilities of Rock Band Network: I now find it frustrating that there’s any music that I can listen to but can’t play along with in a game. So I’m very much looking forward to a future world where that is no longer the case, where we have a continuum moving gradually from recordings of music that we purchase to performances of the music that we play ourselves. (Though, as mashups remind us, the linear notion of a continuum is quite misleading here!)

And just as video games will make their presence known in various places in that continuum, so too will they make themselves known increasingly broadly across our culture. But breaking free of the narrow focus on game classification into genres based on gameplay mechanics is, I think, an important step in that broadening influence.

• Joe Armstrong and Simon Peyton Jones discussing Erlang and Haskell. (Via @timbray.)
• SuperBetter, Jane McGonigal’s serious-injury-recovery game. (Via @therealfitz.)

• Elite Beat Agents, meet Phoenix Wright!

  (Via GameSetWatch.

• A light-and-mirror puzzle in a tabletop RPG.
• Cloud pictures. (Via Dubious Quality; the fungus-infected violin link is pretty good, too.)

• A music video version of Danc’s Flash Love Letters.

• Mitu Khandaker on immersion and controllers.

• The best Zork walkthrough I’ve ever heard.

  (Via MTV Multiplayer.)

• And, because I seem to be incapable of doing one of these without some sort of random Japanese offering:

  (Via Pink Tentacle, of course.)

9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight control, then other people get mad when their ideas aren’t used, and you lose good ideas. But design by committee doesn’t work, either.

To solve this, you need a way to get everybody on the same page. Their answer: each game has One Question that you can always come back to as a touchstone. Compare this to Level 5’s answer from Wednesday (or, for that matter, Bioware’s answer from later on Friday); note also Iwata’s / Miyamoto’s claim that design documents don’t work to this end, because people don’t read anything. In addition, as an audience member pointed out to me after the talk, just phrasing your touchstone in the form of a question has benefits, in that merely repeating it gets you thinking about whether or not it applies to what you’re doing.

For Guitar Hero, the question was “Does this rock?”. For Rock Band, they began with the question of “Is this different from what we’ve done before?”, which is of course a lousy question: there’s no way to focus a team behind it. After a lot of experimentations/investigations, they settled on a much better question, “Is this an authentic band experience?” So, for example, for the gameplay, this suggested adding big rock endings, coming back from the brink, and solo bonuses; it suggested avoiding powerups, guitars that caught on fire, and minigames.

So that gets everybody on the same page. Still, though, to really understand others’ suggestions demands mind reading, and can lead to graceless compromises. His solution involved something called perceptual control theory, which I don’t really understand, but the example he gave (which sounded kind of like a Theory of Constraints evaporating cloud to me) was: people complain about hard songs in random setlists. One bad solution is to say “what part of random don’t you understand?” and tell people to learn to play better. Another bad solution is to come up with some complicated algorithm to improve the setlists and make them not, in fact, random. A better solution: give people some info in advance about the difficulty of the setlist. (Editorial note: though, personally, I wouldn’t mind if I could pick the difficulty of each song in a random setlist independently.)

More on the theme of feedback from players: hardcore players will tell you, frequently at length, what they think about your game and what they think you should change about it. (See the previous sentence for an example!) One thing to keep in mind here is that the term “hardcore” contains multiple cultures; you have to interpret the advice you get in the context of the culture that spawns it. More casual players won’t tell you; fortunately, achievement data gives lots of information there. For example, in the original Rock Band, they were surprised at how much more popular the band tour mode was than the solo tour instruments (they’d thought of the former as relatively hardcore); they reacted by adding a patch to make the band tour even more accessible, which proved to be quite successful, and removed the solo tour style from the sequel.

Other tidbits:

• Separate design from content as much as possible. E.g. they needed to make it easy to drop in songs at the last moment; to make this work with all the various playlists that a song might appear in, they added a layer of indirection by having the playlists generated from metadata associated with the songs, instead of writing the playlists directly.
• Don’t design for some sort of ideal situation in your head: it will take a long time and probably won’t be what people actually want.
• A good use of user suggestions: one of the Rock Band 2 battles of the bands was entitled “Schrödinger’s Cat battle”, containing the songs “Dead” (The Pixies), “Alive” (Pearl Jam), and “Wanted Dead or Alive” (Bon Jovi).
• They’re the world’s largest manufacturer of drum sticks.

10:30am: Stretching Beyond Entertainment: The Role of Games in Personal and Social Change. A panel discussion including Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, Bing Gordon, Lorne Lanning, and Ed Fries. But, apparently, you weren’t supposed to be interested in what any of those guys might have to say, and the real draw was supposed to be the moderator, Rusel DeMaria, because for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the panel, the moderator spoke more than all five of the panelists put together.

I was kind of expecting to be annoyed by Lorne Lanning, and my expectations were met: he even discussed Abe’s Oddyssee, and presented it as a game where, if you choose, you could kill the Mudokons with gruesome and entertaining death animations, only to realize the error of your ways when confronted with the bad ending. (I believe he even used the phrase “profound impact” when talking about this.) Whereas my experience was that you could choose to dutifully slog through the game’s puzzles, saving as many Mudokons as you could, and realize when you nonetheless got the (gratuitously callous) bad ending that the error of your ways was letting the game come anywhere near your console.

Will Wright said some interesting things, though; the one that stuck with me was his claim that the works in other media that have brought about the most social change are those that have honestly depicted bad behavior instead of those that have depicted good behavior. (So, hey, video games are halfway there!) The John Holt fan in me was amused by Bing Gordon’s anti-schooling rabble rousing. But, all in all, not a good choice.

12:00pm: The Dating Game, with Dustin Clingman, Richard Dansky, Wendy Despain, and Steve Meretzky. (And with much more active and effective audience participation than any other session I attended.) This was my most pleasant surprise of the conference: I mostly went because I loved Planetfall and because, frankly, there wasn’t a lot else in the time slot, but it turned out to be thoroughly delightful.

The question that the session posed: in the U.S., the canonical thing to do on a first date is go to a movie. (Well, dinner plus a movie.) What would have to change for playing a video game to replace going to a movie? They broke down their analysis into a number of subquestions; basically, it came down to why are movies an actively good first date and why are games an actively bad first date? But the discussion went in all sorts of directions at different times, so I won’t stick to the script, instead just listing some of the points that were raised:

• Movies are in a public, neutral space: currently, video games usually aren’t played in such a space.
• That public space is dark, giving you some privacy.
• Movies are a shared experience, with no scope for dominance in your shared experience. In particular, competition is bad, which is one strike against games.
• But cooperation is good: you can imagine bonding more strongly while working together to create something while playing a game than you might while watching a movie.
• One audience member reported a game date working well when they were playing a cooperative light-gun shooter side by side in a sit-down semi-enclosed arcade cabinet, which addressed all the above issues.
• In a movie you have your hands free, and you won’t die a gruesome death if you look away from the screen and at your companion for a bit.
• When going to a movie, it’s typically the first time both people have seen it, and you don’t have to worry about differences in prior expertise, so both participants are on a more level playing field.
• Multiple audience members brought up the example of a carnival as a successful first date, and a Japanese audience member said that was quite common in his company. And games are part of the carnival experience; they can provide a way for people to show off something they can do well (while dominating an external situation instead of the other person), which can certainly be attractive.
• Movies give you something to talk about afterwards, allowing you to get to know the other person without exposing too much of yourself right off the bat.
• There’s an established “date movie” genre; what can we learn from it, what makes it successful?
• Movies (especially date movies) hit on emotion a lot.

They didn’t come to any grand conclusions—it was much more in the spirit of “let’s see what we can come up with when thinking about this together” than “here’s how to solve this problem”—but I thoroughly enjoyed the meandering discussions that occurred.

1:00pm: Lunch, in the delightful company of Michael Abbott, Wes Erdelack, and Manveer Heir.

2:30pm: Lionhead Experiments Revealed. Molyneux speaking, and I expected more out of him. Lionhead lets people propose/run experimental projects between games (kind of like Google’s 20 percent time, but less bold), so Peter talked about that and showed some examples as experiments. But nothing about the details of their structure or about the experiments he showed particularly grabbed me.

4:00pm: The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. My writeup for this turned out to be long enough that I’m splitting it off into a separate post.

• My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s status as a planet.
• An excellent Rock Band story. (I agree with the post that the comment is attached to as well, of course.)
• A cool multimedia take on Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”.
• A particularly good optical illusion, from a blog full of them.

• I’ve been meaning to do a longer response to this video by Shamus Young on why the difficult level in the new Prince of Persia game is so important, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll at least link to it here.

• I am now convinced that I have to play Mother 3.
• The Princess Rescuing Application: how game design might teach us to design better applications.
• The latest Brainy Gamer podcast had a very interesting interview with a couple of the people behind Flower.(And yes, though it feels ridiculous, it seems increasingly likely that I’ll be buying a four-hundred dollar game console primarily to play a couple of downloadable five/ten buck games.)
• I don’t generally have any interest in the “games as art” discussion (largely because many of the answers are so obvious; see the Rock Band post linked to above for another example of a discussion that I’m similarly bored with), but this post was worth reading.

• A dot-matrix printer in Conway’s game of Life:

• Ben Abraham just finished an excellent interview series with Marty O’Donnell on video game music: here’s the first part, and here’s a search for all the parts.
• A soothing, meditative game.
• Right vs. effective.
• A pair of thoughts on choices in games.

Which raises the question: which model do I want? There are a lot of things I like about the Nano, but I’m getting more drawn to the Touch. Twitter is a big draw here—it’s very unfortunate that, for example, when I’m playing a game and Liesl or Miranda is using the laptop, I can’t tweet my brilliant insights. And it seems to be exploding as a game platform: the latest First Wall Rebate episode was devoted to the game Ruben & Lullaby for the platform, for example, and while I’m not sure whether or not I want to play that specific game, I definitely want to have access to a platform where games like that exist.

Given that, the only reason for me to get a Nano over a Touch would be if the Touch were difficult to carry everywhere with me: it has to live in my pocket, or in my hand if I’m out jogging. I tried on a colleague’s iPhone for size, though, and I’m pretty confident that the iPod Touch will be sufficiently portable for my needs.

Storage is another question. My last Nano was 8GB, which was fine; then again, storage usage always increases over time, and I’ll need to leave room for applications. So I’ll certainly want at least 16GB; at first, I was thinking that 32GB would be an even better idea, but, browsing through the app store, I was unable to find any apps that took up more than 100MB of space, and most of them were a tenth or even a hundredth that size. Given that, a 16GB model should have room to spare even if I throw in a hundred apps on top o my current music/podcast collection (which is very unlikely), and I don’t envision myself watching movies on it, so there doesn’t seem to be much reason to go with 32GB.

Anything else I should worry about? I’m still not sure what to do about cases, or indeed whether to get one at all: I’m not too worried about it getting scratched, since it wouldn’t live in the same pocket as my keys or anything else metal, but a colleague pointed out that I might need to worry about dropping it. So maybe I’ll get a case; I haven’t made up my mind one way or another, and am open to recommendations on the subject.

Anything else I’m missing? I’ll post again asking for application recommendations once I actually have it, but feel free to stick in suggestions for that here, too.

But I kept asking; I tried not to be annoying about it, but when I felt like playing it, I would ask both Liesl and Miranda if either of them felt like joining in before jumping in solo. And finally, last week, Liesl accepted an invitation.

I kind of expected her to start with vocals, because of the aforementioned singing, but she decided to play bass instead. She’s been doing quite a solid job, too, quickly starting to earn bass grooves.

And, just a few days later, she seems quite solidly hooked: I’ve been playing a lot of Rock Band 2 over the last week, but I’ve almost never had to play alone, and as often as not she’s the one inviting me to play instead of the other way around. In fact, her band has caught up to Miranda’s band already: all of North America is open to us, and while we haven’t yet gotten a plane with her band, that battle has been available for some time, she just wants to explore some of the other songs that are available before diving into that.

Yesterday, for the first time, all three of us played together; we just need a drummer and we’ll have a full band! (Fortunately, our friend Scott was doing a decent job on the drums when he tried out the game over Thanksgiving.) We all had a good time, and the game is even more fun with three people than it is with two. A little bit safer, too: all of us were playing at difficulty levels where occasionally we’d hit a song that was a bit beyond one of us, but with two other people to save us, we didn’t have to worry about it.

The huge amount of content is finally starting to hit home, too: I really do think that it’s beating down my completionist tendencies, even without my having dipped into the DLC options. Everywhere we turn, there are new songs to play; and, as often as not, when given random songs, old friends from the first game show up. (Or enemies: I like Brainpower a lot, but the triplets kill me most of the time! Good thing I’m playing with a couple of my closest friends to save me…) These days, it feels it more like my iPod on shuffle mode: everywhere I turn, I’ll be listening to something different, and frequently something I haven’t heard in a while.

I’ve stuck with guitar ever since I started on the second game; I really should give the other instruments a try again. (I did do the first bass challenge; I was surprised how much fun bass was, and also learned that switching to up strokes is a reasonable way to give my hand a break during songs with a lot of fast notes.) Probably not just yet, though: I want to get farther both with Liesl’s band and with the challenges before switching instruments.

And I should try it online. Maybe we can do it for the next VGHVI play session, once Roger’s Xbox gets fixed?

I wasn’t planning to be obsessive about achievements, but when playing through Pretend We’re Dead I only missed the very last note before the big rock ending. (Grr. I didn’t check, did they change the rhythm up a bit there?) So of course I had to go through that song again, and completed it the next time; it’s easy enough (regular rhythm, no fast notes) as long as you’re comfortable with chord changes. After which I browsed through the achievements list a bit more, and noticed the one about creating a logo; that was a surprising amount of fun, I was quite impressed by the options there. I don’t have a high-quality version of Kiss Me Kate’s logo available, unfortunately, but you can see a woefully shrunken version in the bottom right below:

(The picture was taken via my profile page on the game’s web site, by the way.)

So much to do: so many songs to play, so much more of the main band tour mode to play (ideally with Miranda), so many more challenges, and I haven’t begun to dip into online play (whether cooperative or competitive) or downloadable content. (Other than Still Alive.) I also haven’t yet tried any instrument other than guitar (or the new drum trainer mode) on this iteration; I have every intention to try to play guitar and vocals together as well, but I’ll need to work up to that first.

My twitter feed is full of love for Fable 2, Far Cry 2, and Fallout 3; I may eventually give all of those games a try, and in fact I’m quite looking forward to the first one, but at this point I have a hard time imagining any of them displacing my love for this game.

It didn’t actually seem like the songs were getting much harder as they went along; I think vocal difficulty in that game has more to do with how the song fits your voice than anything inherent to the songs themselves. And, of course, with how familiar you are with the song: I’m sure I would have done much worse on vocals if I hadn’t played through all the songs several times on other instruments.

For those of you keeping score at home, this means that I finished guitar solo tour on Hard (and have done all but one song on Expert), drums on Medium (did two-thirds of them on Hard), and vocals on Hard (didn’t try any on Expert). My initial reaction was that the difficulty settings were off on vocals compared to the other instruments: I don’t consider myself a good singer (I’ve never been in a choir or anything), but I didn’t have any real trouble going through it on Hard. Thinking about it more, though, that’s not entirely fair: I’m not completely tone-deaf, I will happily start singing at random opportunities, and it’s not like I play the guitar while taking a shower!

One related thing I noticed: singers seem noticeably less competitive than other instruments, in that I looked through the high scores on vocals and my rankings were much higher than my guitar rankings, even though I’m a much better guitar player in the game. There’s one song where I’m the 3000′th best singer, which honestly boggles the mind; and there were several songs where there weren’t even 100,000 people on the leaderboards. So if you want to be on a Rock Band leaderboard, vocals is the place to go.

That was about three weeks ago, and I was planning to take a bit of a break before diving into the sequel. (I’m playing too many other games right now, including another open-ended one.) But then a kind generous soul donated a copy of Rock Band 2 to the cause, and we had some people over for Thanksgiving, and well, you know how these things go. Miranda and I revived The Brosstones yesterday; I also started my own band (Kiss Me Kate; my first choice was Bianca, but that was taken) and I played my first challenge. (And gold starred the second song I played on solo guitar; ha.)

I was a bit taken aback at first by the lack of Solo Tour in RB2: I’ve quite enjoyed playing through all the songs on the different instruments, after all. But now that I’ve thought about it a bit more, I’m happy enough with that: it’s such an open-ended game (more than 80 songs to start off with, but of course there are hundreds more available for purchase) that playing through it linearly like that perhaps doesn’t make so much sense. I did enjoy the way the difficulty progressed as I went through the songs in the original (and as I changed from the tougher songs on Medium drums to the easier songs on Hard drums), but RB2 has set challenges available if you want to test your skills, and there’s something to be said for actually playing the songs that you feel like playing instead of mindlessly following a list. (And it’s not like the difficulty information is hidden or anything.) And, most of all, I trust Harmonix: if this is what they think is going to provide the most enjoyable experience, I’m willing to go along.

So I guess I know what I’ll be doing for the next year. And it’s actually really nice to have started playing RB2 soon after it came out: I started playing the original much later, which meant that I had my hands full just getting to know the songs on the disk. Whereas I should get to know the RB2 songs on disk long before RB3 (or the Beatles game!) comes out, so I’m really looking forward to jumping into downloadable content while waiting.

I am extraordinarily surprised, amazed, pleased by this. Books have been very important to me for longer than I can remember (I used to read upwards of five hundred books a year), and there are out-of-print books that I’ve had to search years to find. The very concept of “out-of-print book” offends my soul: books are the cultural heritage of our species, they are a sacred gift, and the idea that they can simply be made inaccessible offends my soul.

It should also offend the constitution: while I don’t expect others to share my reverence, I’m happy to compromise on the matter and allow that copyright should have as its goal “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. (Actually, I don’t like the word “useful” there, but never mind that for now.) And there, too, restricting access to out-of-print books is quite counterproductive. Especially given the orphan works problem: there is no realistic way to find who has the right to allow copying of the vast majority of out-of-print works.

There has been some rumbling in these areas, so I was cautiously optimistic that we’d have some progress within the next decade; I was completely unprepared to finally get around to reading yesterday’s newspaper this evening and come across this. Especially given how sensible it is: sure, I would like to eliminate the concept of “out-of-print book” entirely, but as long as the default is set to allow viewing/purchasing unless the rights-holder actively objects, that’s 95% of the victory.

I can only hope that other industries will follow the lead of book publishers here. I’ve given up on getting anything sensible (heck, anything not actively self- and culture-destructive) out of the music industry; maybe the movie industry will see the light, though? (Admittedly, the texture of the orphan works problem is rather different there.) As somebody who cares about old video games more than most, I’d certainly like to see a solution in that space as well.

Side note: this is the first time that I’ve felt that my twitter feed has let me down. This was announced two days ago, but nary a tweet mentioning it. I trust that I’ll find a few entries in my feed reader on the subject? (I haven’t read RSS feeds since Monday.) I have, reluctantly, removed Lawrence Lessig from my feed reader, but I did go out and look for his take on the matter, if you’re curious. Though I suppose there’s a bit of poetic rightness in learning about this from a print medium…

I ended up making it through tier 6; in a bit of a surprise, my guitar nemesis, which was also the song I did worst on on Medium drums, namely Green Grass, was the song that I did by far the best on: I had a 220-odd note streak, almost a hundred over my longest streak on any other song, and I probably would have five-starred it if I hadn’t been hoarding energy waiting for tricky bits. (Which is a sign of how bad I am on drums: I have yet to five-star a single song.) But two of the songs on tier 7 were too tricky for me; I’m sure I can overcome this problem with more practice, but the consensus seems to be that Rock Band 2 is significantly better for honing your drum skills.

So I decided to give vocals a try today. In a bit of arrogance, I decided to start on Hard, despite my lack of singing experience; I’m doing okay through the first 20 songs, though I have had to restart a few. And it’s certainly harder than it looks: while I’ve five-starred several songs, I haven’t come particularly close to perfect on any of them. (Except maybe the rap ones? Which I would just as soon not have in the game; it’s not like any of them are particularly wonderful on guitar, either.) Unsurprisingly, the ones with female vocalists are the hardest for me (I don’t have a particularly wide singing range; yes, I am aware that I can skip up/down an octave if it helps, but it usually doesn’t); I have renewed respect for women who do well singing the game, given the relatively large number of male vocal parts.

Usually, if I fail out a song, it’s because I’m not managing to produce a consistent pitch at all, rather than because I’m consistently producing the wrong pitch. So the moral here seems to be: it’s much better to sing incorrectly with conviction than to sing with so little conviction that it can’t tell what you’re trying to do. Of course, it does no good to belt out a wrong note after note, you have to alter your singing according to the game’s feedback; it turns out, though, that most of the time if I’m singing with enough conviction then I can actually do a decent job myself of telling whether or not I’m doing a good job. So the moral here is: don’t try to avoid being judged: the mere fact that you set your actions up to be testable will have good effects. (Just like programming!)

Actually, I’m not quite sure how the game detects the pitch: I don’t feel that I’m wobbling in my pitch all that much when I’m singing quietly, but maybe I’m wrong? It seems to pick up Miranda’s voice okay when she’s singing relatively quietly. Just for kicks, I tried whistling, because I’m better at holding pitch there than when singing, but it doesn’t pick that up at all. (Which is fine, I’d rather sing than whistle.)

I also got pretty hoarse; I’m not sure whether I’m suffering more injuries when playing drums or vocals, but both are more of a physical challenge than guitar is. Fortunately, I’m not yet suffering to the extent that Mitch is…

Guitar remains my favorite instrument. (It’s also the one that I’m by far the best at; no coincidence there, though the linkage isn’t quite as straightforward as me simply liking things that I’m good at.) But, as with drums, I’m very glad I’ve given vocals a try; I’m not sure yet whether or not I’ll give it a try on Expert after going through Hard (heck, I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish all the songs on Hard!), but I might, and I imagine that I’ll give vocals a try again in Rock Band 2 and on future downloadable content that I purchase.

It turns out that skill in playing plastic instruments does transfer, at least to some extent: I started on Medium, and I was passing the songs fine. For the first few songs, my leg hurt like crazy; then one of the pre-song splash screens told me that I could keep my foot down pretty much the whole time, only raising it to play the pedal, and after that, my leg felt a lot better.

What was disconcerting, and remains disconcerting, is that I’m missing a lot of notes, and I can’t tell why. Of course, sometimes I can tell why: I’m playing the wrong thing! But sometimes it seems to my brain and ears that I’m playing the right thing (I was going to say “playing the right notes”, but that’s not correct – pads? Hmm, I guess I’ll stick with notes) and I’ll still lose my streak. Some of that is probably simple user error, but I think there’s something more subtle going on in some circumstances: if I fall out of a streak partway on the seventh iteration of a repetitive sequence, then clearly my hands and feet are capable of getting it right, so if it sounds right to my ears, what’s going on? In fact, I caught a few situations where I fell out of a streak immediately after hitting the last note in a star sequence: clearly I got all the notes right, since I got star power credit for the sequence, and I hadn’t played any notes since the end of the sequence, so how could I have lost my streak?

My best guess is that I’m occasionally double-tapping somehow, especially with my left hand; I’ll need to experiment with more forceful strokes or less forceful strokes or a looser grip or a tighter grip or something until I figure out what’s going on. It was fairly frustrating: I went through the first 15 songs in the morning, and they generally felt quite easy, yet my longest streak was 63 notes, and on half the songs I didn’t even reach a 4x multiplier once. (I never got 5 stars; I think I only even got 4 stars on one of those songs.)

I did better in the afternoon: I had streaks over 100 notes several times, and had several songs where I hit 4x multipliers repeatedly. Still no 5 stars, though, and still more 3 stars than 4. Ironically, I frequently had an easier time getting good streaks going on the harder songs; in fact, I did my best on the next-to-last song. (Is it Run to the Hills? I can’t remember.) I did my worst on my old nemesis, Green Grass, despite its only being tier 6 on drums; it’s just really long and had a few sequences where my foot and left hand accidentally got synced up instead of being on opposite notes.

A very different feel musically than playing guitar: a lot more repetition, no solos. Which was reflected in the way star power works: you can’t turn on overdrive at arbitrary points (though you do have frequent opportunities), and in fact I found it a bit annoying to hold off on using it, but that’s fine because there aren’t as many hard sections where you need lots of stored-up overdrive to rescue yourself. (Or if there were, I didn’t notice them on Medium.) Interesting to see the way the notes and rhythms were varied, especially on the harder songs; I should clearly pay more attention to the drum parts when listening to music.

Lots of fun; I certainly wasn’t expecting to play through all the songs in a single day, but it’s quite addictive. (I skipped the bonus tracks, but I did do Still Alive.) I even tried the first five songs on Hard; quite doable, but I imagine I will run into trouble on the later songs at that difficulty level, and my foot definitely needs training. (I imagine my hands will need training as well on the later songs, as the notes come faster, though that wasn’t an issue on Medium.) Fortunately, I saved a link to this Game | Life article which gives some useful tips; I’ll have to study it. And maybe I’ll hold off on Expert until I’ve switched over to Rock Band 2, so I can take advantage of its improved drum training modes?

But I’m holding off on RB2 for the time being: my experiences today have confirmed my idea that I want to spend more time exploring what the original has to offer before moving on to the sequel. (Though I imagine that guitar will continue to be my primary instrument.) I’m not done with drums yet, I haven’t tried vocals, and I suppose I should even try the bass. And there’s some DLC I want to try out, too, though that could conceivably wait until after I’ve seen what RB2 has to offer.

What a game Rock Band is. “Game” isn’t even the right word: what a platform, what a medium. It seems entirely likely that I’ll still be regularly playing it or one of its successors a year from now; I wouldn’t be surprised if I were doing so a decade from now.

It took a while to get used to the feel of the guitar and the location of the solo buttons; after a bit, though, I was rather enjoying myself on the solo. It felt a bit odd never to have to strum, but there’s enough to think about in that solo to keep me busy, and the failure modes felt more realistic than when I was playing the traditional way. (I.e. I missed a few notes, but didn’t completely fall off the rails when I messed up as I did when doing hammer-ons/pull-offs.) Not that I really know what realistic guitar playing feels like—I’m mainly a piano player, though in a pinch I can play Alice’s Restaurant on a guitar over and over again—but messing up the rhythm on a real guitar doesn’t kill you.

So, after a bit, I managed to finish the song: in fact, it said that I’d done a good job on the solo, rather better than I did on the non-solo parts! After which I spent an hour or so with Green Grass, both in practice mode and with the real mode. Again, I did noticeably better than with the old guitar, but this time it wasn’t enough to make a difference: that second solo is really long and, in a few places, really hard even with the solo buttons. Eventually, I decided that I wasn’t motivated enough to finish it: I’m fairly confident that I could if I put in enough effort—there are only two areas in the second solo where I absolutely need star power, and there are enough manageable star power recharge sections between them that, if the stars align, I should be able to squeak by—but it would probably take a whole afternoon, I’d largely be doing it for the achievement (since I still wouldn’t be able to finish the song at all reliably when playing with others), and it’s not worth the effort for me. (Dan, can you finish that song on expert? Do people at Harmonix generally find it pretty doable?)

After that, I decided to go through the bonus tracks to figure out which ones I was going to export to RB2. (Answer: Brainpower (and I really should go buy a Freezepop album); Day Late, Dollar Short; I Get By; Outside; Time We Had.) And, at some point during this process (when playing Seven, I believe), I realized:

The Rock Band guitar is awful. Sure, having the solo buttons is nice during hard solos (though I actually prefer the way hammer-ons and pull-offs play during the fast non-solo bits, e.g. the start of Green Grass). But you have to put up with lots and lots of pain to get those solo buttons, and in no way is the tradeoff worth it. It’s not an accident that I did better on the solo of Flirtin’ with Disaster than I did on the non-solo parts: the neck buttons are hard to press reliably, the strum bar is a lot worse. Initially I’d chalked this up to not being used to the guitar, but by now I’d been using the RB guitar for a couple of hours, so I should be used to it enough by then. But I was still having a hard time making it through Seven; I switched back to the GH guitar, and I couldn’t believe how much better it felt. My fingers could just glide over the neck buttons, my strumming improved drastically, and I was suddenly enjoying myself, instead having the game feel like a chore.

Which is, after all the point here: I’m not doing this because of the achievements, I’m doing this because I enjoy the game, because I want to be able to feel as much of the music in the songs as possible, and because I want to do so in multiplayer mode. In particular, I was hoping to be able to play expert more in multiplayer mode, since the songs just aren’t as musical in hard; but the difference there is dwarfed between the difference between the feeling of the RB guitar versus the GH3 guitar.

So: no more solo buttons for me. I imagine the RB2 guitar is better, but at this point I don’t trust Harmonix’s instrument production skills enough to be willing to pay for it without giving it a try first. (Anybody in the Bay Area have one and want to let me try it? And what is the deal behind the instrument quality difference, anyways? I accept that Red Octane has a lot more experience in that area, but Harmonix is full of musicians, I can’t believe they don’t find their guitar frustrating to play. Is it that hard to get neck buttons that feel good?) Will the GH4 guitar let you use the touch pad as solo buttons? If so, I’ll probably give that a try at some point.

So my journey through RB expert guitar comes to an end. I guess it’s time for me to try out the drums next?