Journalistic Ownership & Rock Band 3

Hardcore, I'm sure.

A somewhat unexpected side effect of working as a journalist is that you come to feel ownership over certain issues, especially those which you spend a lot of time researching and reporting on.

So I felt when I saw this news development, posted on Gizmodo this afternoon: a week from today Rock Band 3 drops, and it's made a huge advance in controller options: one controller features buttons that you play just like a regular guitar, and another is actually a guitar, with pressure sensors under the fingers so the game knows whether you hit the note. What this means is that Rock Band can actually market the idea that the game will teach you how to play a guitar (or at least how to follow along with certain songs).

Of course, being a former PC Mag intern, I was familiar with the idea, to the point where I immediately went and found this story, which I wrote in the spring of 2008. (Because of a PCMag.com redesign, the publish date says January 2009.) I wrote about how games like Guitar Hero have roused interest in rock music, but aren't doing anything to actually teach kids (or somewhat reclusive adults) how to play guitar. My theory was proven when I gave my stepdad with 20 years of experience playing guitar the game for Christmas: He could barely keep up with strumming along at the beginner level at first.

I mentioned in that article a product called Guitar Rising, which had won an award in 2007 and was being developed to be released as just what Rock Band has now: a game into which you can plug in an actual guitar. The Guitar Rising website doesn't seem to have been updated recently, so one can only wonder what happened to the "licensing talks" that were underway when I wrote the article more than two years ago.

This is a super cool development -- using video games to actually teach people a musical instrument is a whole new frontier -- but of course, there's always a flipside, though a minor one. The Gizmodo writer notes, "Harmonix, do you realize that you've got in your powers the ability to make kids learn the songs you want them to? Which is basically shaping the future of music? Use it well, my friends." Everyone will know the Billboard Top 100, but no one may know [insert obscure, largely unknown song that is actually a brilliant piece of music]. But that just may be my wannabe music snobishness talking.

Fun fact: Rock Band 3 will also add a keyboardist to the band. Now people get the chance to butcher those musical lines as well! Wonder if it'll be as effective as teaching drums and guitar now will be?