Some of you may know it as the ballyhooed guitar teaching tool that was hyped up about a year ago, released, and then dropped off the face of the Earth in the eye of the public consciousness, but I've been not-so-quietly plugging away at it off and on for a while now. One thing that happens when I play it is that despite the fact that I cannot play guitar, that I actually suck—I feel kinda awesome doing it, which is honestly more than I can say I ever felt even when I was all the way up at the master level in stuff like Dance Dance Revolution or the lesser guitar-based games Guitar Hero and Rock Band (feel kinda eh even though destroying). It's a novel concept, that this Rocksmith, which basically tells you what to play on the guitar and gives you your own full backing band to play it with, makes you feel good even when you are doing bad.
I think people have been calling stuff like this gameification lately, things like leveling up your fictional self for doing pointless crap like "going somewhere" in Foursquare or saving money in your bank accounts in online banking systems. The thing that is interesting to me about Rocksmith though is the base material—it just feels good to play a note on the guitar and have it ring out through the virtual distorters all heavy and crunched.
In a way, that makes it interesting starter material. As humans I think we are naturally drawn toward making and playing music, and embedded with kind of rhythms that move us and drive us. Of course, looking back on it, I somehow completely forgot to mention Rocksmith anywhere in that last article I wrote about rhythm games. Maybe that's because in a way, it barely registers in my mind as a game and feels more like it's just my accompaniment, the tracks I "play along" to when I play guitar.
They used to claim maybe you could learn how to Really play guitar from playing Rocksmith, whatever that means. What does it mean to be a doer of something? Sometimes people ask me if I'm a writer, and I generally try to just say I write. Sure, I write, does that make me a writer? Eric Clapton plays guitar, but is also a guitarist. I play a guitar, with some notes on a screen and a sorta neo-karaoke track in the background, it's how I play. Does that make me a guitarist? I don't know scales or many chords, I cannot magically make a song. But it feels good to do it. It's a question worth pondering for only a moment, because I'm not sure that one's level of skill dictates how authentic the experiences they are having can become.
It's kind of interesting that when I sit down to play it, I don't really think about it as "playing Rocksmith" so much as just that I feel like playing some guitar, and this is the way that I happen to do it. It's become sort of a weird software for me there, in that halfway realm between game and application, which is maybe where the true genius of game and real world intersecting can kinda be seen in something like this. Could I pick up my same guitar and play with other people around me on a stage? I think so, if I remembered what I was supposed to play, if I practiced at it a little I could remember it. Does that mean I can play guitar now? The important thing is that Rocksmith lets me do it without needing to deal with all the other pesky real world crap that comes along with playing a real world guitar, the crap that would ultimately lead to me surrounded by a bunch of junk in front of a lot of people.
In a way, when I was slamming buttons on that Nintendo controller while looking at nothing, I knew that the basic idea of it was fun: people like to "make music" by tapping away on all kinds of stuff, the kitchen table, or their feet on the subway floor. It wouldn't have taken a prophet either to deduce after stuff like Guitar Freaks that hey, it would be neat to do this for real. But maybe it's not the software but the experience I could have never predicted, that doing "so-so" at a music game would remain consistently entertaining for nearly a year now, even as my skill at certain songs only improves negligibly. I guess that's the true magic of foresight: like dreaming of being writers or rock stars, we know there's something out there waiting for us, but we can never know what it would be like "for real."