A Real Rock Band?

It’s New Year’s Eve, and our bassist is flipping out. She’s standing in front of the TV, her right hand positioned on her hip, while her left holds a beer.

“Guys,” she says. “I’m not going to say anything if you want to play without me… But if you do, I’ll just stand right here and enjoy myself.”

A New Year’s Eve party isn’t the place where you’d expect to see the normally hardcore Xbox 360 gaming machine. But the release of extraordinarily party-friendly “Rock Band” changed all of that. The game allows a group to pretend to play as a band with plastic instruments that plug into the game console. Up to four people can play since there is a microphone for singing, two guitars (one for bass and one for lead), and even a drum set.

The whole setup could easily take up 100 square feet – a precious commodity in the Bay Area. Not the mention $160 sticker price for the game alone. It turns out, though, that Rock Band is about as worth it as we could have expected from a video game. At Bigpika's place, the game is played over many late nights. Repeated use of the drum kit causes the foot pedal to break in half, necessitating an emergency repair. We even pepper each other with emails during the work day with song lyrics that are stuck in our head. Here’s a sample of what my inbox looks like in the span of a day:

We do play a lot. This time however, our excesses with Rock Band, don’t compare with others I’ve seen.

(1) Take the night I am at Precious’ place, playing the game. After he shotguns yet another beer, I ask Precious if the game is more fun when drunk.

He looks at me seriously and says “Jacks, the thing about this game is it makes you drink. I play this game… and then I start drinking, and soon enough I can’t play so well anymore.”

It sounded like a page out of an alcoholics-anonymous meeting (“It’s not my fault, I swear!”). Indeed he could have probably laid off the alcohol as later that day Precious text messaged a girl he was dating to tell her he couldn’t afford to see her anymore (I guess she never paid for anything), and, even worse, drunk dialed his mom.

(2) As increasingly seems to be the case, the true fanatics take their craft to YouTube. The site is full of videos of players showing off their stuff, and 5 year and 8 year old kids playing better than I ever could. My favorite is one where a college-aged kid dresses up to look like a rock star, plays with an abundance of flair, and ultimately smashes his friend’s guitar upon completing the song.

Rock Band is certainly a good time because it can inspire these belly-laugh moments. But beneath it all, there’s a quieter debate about how realistic Rock Band really is. Does it teach you how to listen to music? To play an instrument?

On one hand, people argue that Rock Band is nothing like playing in a band, and that they’d rather spend their time learning a real instrument. On the other extreme, one of my coworker once made the bold claim, “Let me put it this way – I would feel pretty damn comfortable if ‘Enter the Sandman’ came on, and I was sitting behind Lars Ulrich’s drum kit.”

Which brings me back to our jilted bassist. Upon seeing the scene unfold, bassist planted in front of the TV, crowd expectantly waiting, a fellow party-goer noted, “Alcohol, loud music, and a band that is breaking up in front of my eyes... Maybe this is more like a real rock band than I thought."