Year in review: The best of the blog

Above: Actually the best of Insult Swordfighting.

Today through Christmas Eve, we'll be recapping the year that was. First up: the best of Insult Swordfighting, 2009.

Another year has come and gone, and with it have gone a crapload of blog posts. I continue to be amazed that anybody reads these posts at all, never mind commenting and linking to them. But you do. This year, Insult Swordfighting surpassed 1,000 subscribers, which is a thousand more than I ever would have expected. As of this writing, the count is over 1,100. I'm honored. Thank you for reading.

In the interest of not having to produce any original content, here's a look back at Insult Swordfighting's highlights from the past year.

January: Achievement points are awesome. Fallout 3 is also awesome, as evidenced by posts here, here, here, here, and here.

February: A plea for reader questions from readers results in the multi-part Request Hour series, which I should probably do again sometime. Plus, the argument about Guitar Hero that I never want to hear again, parts one and two.

March: Screw modesty. I think the best post I've done might be "Using the sniper rifle in Killzone 2: A photo tutorial." I'm surprised how well the photographs of my television came out. In March, I also attempted to explain why Resident Evil 5 isn't scary, a post I'm pretty sure Tycho responded to in a Penny Arcade newspost without linking it or mentioning me by name. Not that I am bitter.

April: The problem with casual games isn't that they aren't about shooting people and blowing stuff up, it's that the people who make them don't give a toss about user experience.

May: Have you ever wondered how to make your company's awesome new video game stand out from the competition? Here's a handy guide to writing a killer press release.

June: Morality in games is a great idea, and more and more titles are giving you a chance to decide what kind of hero you'll be. So how come it hardly ever works?

July: My friends got together to play a bunch of old video games. I detailed the good, the bad, and the ugly aspects of a nostalgia binge.

August: I ensure that Game Informer will never offer me a job. I meant what I said, and I'm glad I said it. (They did a nice job with the redesign, though.) Also in August, a heartfelt defense of the traditional gamepad.

September: Only seven posts in September. What the hell was I doing all month? Oh, that's right: closing in on the end of an epic fantasy baseball season.

October: The second annual "Year in swooning" quiz is hilarious once again, and it doesn't even include a Modern Warfare 2 blurb! Plus, Borderlands is a blast, even when you're the most useless person on the team.

November: Re: Dragon Age, I throw myself on the mercy of much smarter gamers. Also, praise for level progression in Borderlands and Modern Warfare 2.

December: The games of the decade series just refuses to end.

Tomorrow: Year-end superlatives.

Games of the decade: Guitar Hero

Part of a series of subjective looks at my favorite games of the decade.

Guitar Hero

(2005, PlayStation 2)

Guitar Hero II

(2006, PlayStation 2; 2007, Xbox 360)

Do you remember how silly Guitar Hero seemed? How risky? Peripheral-based music games had always had a place as a niche product. Even games as commercially successful as Dance Dance Revolution weren't taken seriously as members in good standing of the video game fraternity. Guitar Hero was such an iffy bet at the time it came out that we didn't even make an effort to review it for the Phoenix.

It was my good fortune, though, that the Phoenix's Camille Dodero just happened to write a feature on Harmonix at the time, sort of a "local boys make good" piece, and as a part of it she got a free copy of the game. Except she didn't want it, so she foisted it off on Ryan, who works there and blogs for the Phlog and Laser Orgy, and who was my roommate at the time. So it was that on some random December night, he walked in the door with this box under his arm, feeling sheepish for having carried it on the T. Graciously -- or maybe because we both still thought this whole thing looked pretty dumb -- he let me have the first go of it.

From the first note I strummed in the tutorial, I could tell that Guitar Hero was a hell of a lot more than what it seemed like. It all came together perfectly: the snap of the strum bar, the give of the fret buttons, the wail of the note. Playing something in this game gives you a feeling of power and creation. You can describe it to somebody all you want, but until you put the guitar in their hands and let them experience it, they'll never quite get it.

We traded off songs all night, each of us leaping off the couch when it was our turn to play. We didn't think at the time that we were witnessing the leading edge of the zeitgeist. Even then, if you'd asked me to predict the future of music games, I wouldn't have thought they'd become as successful, and eventually as over-saturated, as they have. I wouldn't have thought much of anything beyond what I was thinking then: this is awesome.

Years later, I still think that.

More on Guitar Hero:

• A brief history of Guitar Hero
• The argument about Guitar Hero that I never want to hear again, part one
• The argument about Guitar Hero that I never want to hear again, part two
• A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: Guitar Hero

A brief history of Guitar Hero

It's hard to believe, but Guitar Hero is only a few years old -- closer to 3 years than 4. In that short time, it's changed the landscape of video games. I doubt anybody even thought we needed a pretend-music genre, but here it is, along with Rock Band, luring gamers and non-gamers alike, and raking in billions of dollars in revenue.

The Guitar Hero journey hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows. The brand has grown so quickly that we might have forgotten what it took to get here.

Guitar Hero (2005)

Can you even remember a time when noodling around with a small plastic guitar seemed like a ridiculous thing to do? Seems crazy now, but it's true: people were skeptical of Guitar Hero. The original game was made on a shoestring budget, on an accelerated schedule, and featured only cover versions of its songs. No one knew if it would work -- except, I suspect, the team at Harmonix that put it together. They had to know. Something happened when you picked up that little SG for the first time. It just made sense.

I remember vividly the night I first played Guitar Hero. I wasn't reviewing it. In fact, a staff writer at the paper had written a feature on Harmonix, and didn't want the promo copy they gave her. So she gave it to my roommate at the time, another Phoenix staffer, and he brought it home. We each felt a little silly when we first slung that guitar over our shoulders, but that lasted for about one note. We spent the rest of the night trading off songs, working our way through most of the setlist. It was just as I remember playing games as a kid. We weren't scrutinizing anything. We were just enjoying ourselves, jumping up from the couch as soon as the other person had finished a track.

It was awesome.

Guitar Hero II (2006)

When Guitar Hero II came out a year later, more people were interested. Almost everyone I knew, in fact, wanted to know if I'd be getting it. They offered to help out with the review. And I needed help, because the sequel included a feature that had been sorely lacking from the original: cooperative play. It wasn't much, at the time. One person played the guitar part, and the other person played either the bass or the second guitar. But it added a completely new dimension to the game, presaging the eventual triumph of Rock Band.

Otherwise, the game was a spit and polish. An expanded tracklist and snazzier graphics were welcome, even if nothing else seemed as revolutionary as the co-op. An Xbox 360 port in the spring of 2007 added HD graphics, downloadable content, and a new guitar peripheral.

It was so awesome.

Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s (2007)

Harmonix's final Guitar Hero had "contractual obligation" written all over it. The idea was decent: to tailor the look and sound solely to one era. The tracklist seemed decent in concept, but few of the songs made the transition to the video-game world intact. Whether it was poor song selection or simply bad execution by Harmonix, none of them provided that rush of nailing a beloved lick perfectly. Even Dio's "Holy Diver" turned out to be a dog. Nothing about this game worked. Clearly, Harmonix's brainspace was occupied by Rock Band, which was to launch a few months later.

It pretty much sucked.


Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (2007)

Guitar Hero III marked the official handoff from Harmonix to Neversoft, who previously had been known best for working on the Tony Hawk series, another terrific franchise that was starting to get long in the tooth. Legends of Rock was perfectly playable, and featured the series' strongest track listing to that point -- that is, if you're measuring a song's quality by the popularity of its performers, and not its suitability for a rhythm game.

Legends also made a few critical missteps, which called into question Neversoft's judgment. What had always distinguished the Guitar Hero series in the world of video games was how unlike most other games it seemed. It could be brutally difficult, yes, and demanded much of your hand-eye coordination. But it was accessible in a way that most game genres aren't, and its system of rewards and punishment appealing to non-gamers.

That's why it was so troubling that Neversoft added boss battles, wherein you played dueling guitar parts against Tom Morello, Slash, and even Satan, deploying Mario Kart-style powerups along the way. You can forgive them for trying something new, even if it didn't work, but the battles seemed to violate the spirit that had made Guitar Hero such a phenemoneon. They traded the joy of performance for the capricious challenge of ordinary video games.

It was good, but troubling.

Guitar Hero: On Tour (2008)

Here's where the wheels started falling off. Possibly as the result of a drunken bet, developer Vicarious Visions shipped for Activision a handheld version of Guitar Hero for the Nintendo DS. On one hand, it was sort of impressive that they managed the feat at all. A four-button peripheral plugged into the Game Boy Advance port on the bottom of the DS, and players could strum by scraping a pick-shaped stylus across the screen.

On the other hand -- the hand that you used to press the fret buttons -- the peripheral was painful to use. I mean that literally. 20 minutes of Guitar Hero: On Tour was enough to send shockwaves from my wrist up to my elbow. I recently opted not to click on a link where somebody from the dev team explained how they went through several iterations before settling on the final design of the peripheral. They should have iterated more.

Even more painful: the tracklist included songs by Maroon 5 and Smash Mouth.

Holy shit was it bad.

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (2008)

The Aerosmith edition of Guitar Hero was weak sauce for a couple of reasons: one, because Aerosmith is a lousy band, and two, because the paltry tracklist couldn't make up for their terribleness even with a couple of other decent cuts. Plus, Video Steven Tyler was somehow even more horrifying to behold than Actual Steven Tyler. That's no mean feat.

The real problem with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, though, was that it came out a good 6 months after Rock Band, and a guitar-only music game no longer seemed sufficient. Where were the drums? The vocals? The robust multiplayer that, thanks to Harmonix's new game, had come to define music and rhythm games? Aerosmith seemed like a cash-in at best.

It was terrible.

Guitar Hero: World Tour (2008)

World Tour showcased the best and the worst of what had become of the Guitar Hero brand. Activision's deep pockets ensured another monster set list, including Ozzy's "Crazy Train," which really should have been in Guitar Hero from the beginning. World Tour got on board with what Rock Band was doing, with its own drum and vocal parts, and then did the competition one better by adding a create-a-song feature (which may have been better in theory than in actuality). Neversoft still seemed to lack Harmonix's instinctual understanding of how to construct a note charts, and even their ability to nail the feel of the music, but overall it was a decent time.

It was all right, but the drum kit didn't work very well.

Guitar Hero: Metallica (2009)

This may be the point at which Neversoft has reached equilibrium. Metallica is not, on the surface, much different from the Aerosmith edition, except for the all-important support for a four-piece band. But it's much better, and for a simple reason. It's the inverse of the "Garbage In, Garbage Out" principle: this tracklist is sweet.

The songs cover the breadth of Metallica's career, from their early thrash metal to the soulful power ballads of the black album. (And, yes, the band's entire 1996-2009 output is also well represented. I avoided it then, and I'm avoiding now.) The non-Metallica tracks are up to that standard, as well. Alice in Chains, Mastodon, Queen, Slayer, Thin Lizzy -- there's a range of styles and eras on offer, and all sterling examples of their type.

I still prefer Rock Band, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, when MTV released an AC/DC track pack, they also allowed you export the songs to your hard drive and play them in Rock Band proper. Harmonix's game still feels better to me, devoid of extraneous graphical flourishes and attempts to sex up the act of matching notes onscreen. But Metallica is probably the best Guitar Hero product to come down the pike at least since Legends of Rock, if not Guitar Hero II.

It's good! But maybe they ought to quit while they're ahead.

Related:

• Guitar Hero II (360) impressions
• Guitar Hero III multiplayer impressions
• Speaking of Guitar Hero
• Anyone can play guitar
• Mopping up with Guitar Hero: World Tour

The argument about Guitar Hero that I never want to hear again, part two

Continued from part one.

Yesterday, I talked about how much I hate the commonly expressed opinion that people who enjoy playing music games should learn to play real instruments instead.*

The absurdity of the argument becomes pretty clear if you replace Guitar Hero or Rock Band with something else -- for example, basketball. Say you're playing HORSE with a friend or two at the playground, and some snooty douche comes along and says, "How come you don't play real basketball?"

You would immediately formulate several cogent responses. "Because there aren't enough of us for a game of basketball." "Because we're not in good enough shape for 48 minutes of vigorous athletic activity." "Because we're bad at dribbling, passing, shooting, and keeping score." "Because playing HORSE is fun, you snooty douche."

Of course, no one would ever look down his nose at you for playing HORSE instead of training for a career in the NBA, because these things are all well understood. (It's also unlikely that our fictional person in this scenario would never have played the game or even dribbled a basketball, but that's what happens with critics of music games all the time.)

What's the key here? When you play HORSE, you are not trying to be a "real" basketball player. No one thinks you are. What you're doing is related to basketball, yes, but in the same way that your housecat is related to a cheetah. Although you may even do things like count down "3... 2... 1...!" before launching a 3-point shot and mimicking a buzzer, no one wonders why you aren't trying out for the Lakers. You are adapting your enjoyment of the sport into something that allows you to participate. It doesn't stop you from watching the NBA. Nor does it stop talented athletes from pursuing a career in pro sports.

This is also true of music games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. They are an extension of our enjoyment of music, not a replacement. Playing these games shares more in common with singing in the shower and air-guitaring at your desk than it does with mastering the complexities of a musical instrument. One takes rigorous effort and discipline, while the other requires only a commitment to shaking your ass. Most of us never seriously consider dedicating a good portion of our lives to playing music, for any number of reasons. We participate in the music we like by attending concerts, by dancing or singing along, and -- to use a recent, personal example -- by cranking up the volume on the car radio when WZLX is playing a rock block of Dire Straits.**

In other words, there's a relationship between the artist and the listener, one that doesn't really change when the listener happens to be strumming along on a plastic guitar. As when you bop your head or hum, you're engaging with the artist's work when you play a music game. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think that's what the artists actually want. The obvious difference is that the Guitar Hero guitar or the Rock Band drum kit actually does affect the musical output, but there's little room to put your own imprint on it -- barely more than when you adjust the levels on your stereo. You're still consuming that which someone else has produced.

Look, we can't all be content producers. Or, at least, we can't all master the production of everything we happen to enjoy consuming. This has always been the balance. At the risk of oversimplifying it once again, the reason I don't play a real instrument is because I don't want to. I've already decided what I want to dedicate my time and effort to. I could try to be a musician, but I've chosen to be a writer instead. But I still love rock music -- it's occupied a meaningful place in my life for as long as I can remember. I have always sung along. I always will.

*Lest you think I'm just wailing on a straw man here, a recent example of this argument, and the one that has stuck in my craw since I read it weeks ago, comes from Rob Horning at PopMatters.

**We got to move these refrigerators. We got to move these color TVs.

The argument about Guitar Hero that I never want to hear again, part one

If you're interested in certain controversial subjects, you tend to run across the same facile arguments over and over. Among these are:

• Communism works great -- in theory.
• Religion is the cause of every major war in human history.
• Evolution is a theory, not a fact.

All of which are shorthand for: "I don't understand what I'm talking about, and have no real desire to find out, yet I suffer from an uncontrollable compulsion to express an opinion about things." Here's another one I'd like to throw onto the pile:

Instead of playing Guitar Hero/Rock Band, you should learn to play a real instrument.

This more often expressed as a question: "Why don't you learn to play a real instrument?"

Well, why don't we learn to play real instruments? Because playing real instruments is hard. I know. I played the guitar daily for about a three-year period. In that time, I mastered 10 chords or so. You could say I had a repertoire of about a dozen songs, but only if you were being charitable toward me, and uncharitable toward the songs. This was something I put hundreds of hours of my life into, and I never progressed past the "woeful beginner" stage. It's no wonder -- in Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites research suggesting that approximately 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to master anything.

That's just one musician! It's even harder to get a whole band together. You need at least three people for a band, preferably four -- even, in the case of the E Street Band, several hundred. We're looking at 30,000 man-hours, minimum, just to get enough musicians together to start a decent band. But it's not enough to find people who are proficient at their instruments. They have to share a musical vision, and have the time and commitment necessary to write songs, practice, play gigs, and so on. When you look at it that way, it's a wonder there are any bands around at all, never mind good ones.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band are hard, too, but much less so, and with a much lower barrier of entry. Almost anyone can instantly get the hang of easy difficulty, and start playing whole songs right away. Even medium difficulty is within the grasp of many first-time players. It takes a while to get good enough to handle expert difficulty, but certainly not 10,000 hours.* Here's the real difference: you don't have to be an expert to play the songs and enjoy the games. If you have four people and the necessary equipment, you can tackle any song in the Rock Band library, regardless of each participant's level of ability. It doesn't really matter whether you're good at it or not. That isn't the case with real instruments, even if you're just noodling around at home.

So there you go. There's your answer. Playing instruments: hard. Playing Guitar Hero: easy.

I suspect that's not satisfying to the critics, and I'll admit that it's not satisfying to me. The reason why that's so is because the premise -- that playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band is a substitute for playing real instruments -- is false. Tomorrow, I'll explain why.

Continue to part two.

*It may very well take 10,000 hours to be able to play everything flawlessly on expert difficulty. God knows I can't do it.

Request hour: The hardcasualist's lament, review scores, and underrated games

Tyler echoes the hardcasualist's lament:

I don't play games that often. I own a Playstation 2, and own exactly zero games for it since I lost Guitar Hero. Other than that, I'll pull out the rare old favorite for the PC, play some web-based game, or load something on my iPhone. Occasionally there's a game I really want to play (Rock Band 2!), but to lay out the cash for a current console and a game or two is just not reasonable. Basically, the bar to entry for an extremely casual gamer is way too high.

Never mind that, I'm not even sure I'd be able to figure out how to play some of the newest games coming out before getting frustrated and giving up.

What should the video game industry do about us old fogeys who have more interest in games than Windows Solitaire, but not enough to go buy a PS3? Are there PC games that are more than browser-based time-wasters but don't require the latest and greatest hardware? Or are mobile devices the next gaming platform? Or what?

I was going to say that Nintendo had people like you in mind with the Wii, but that's actually not the case. The Wii was made for lapsed gamers, not people who were priced out of the next generation. There is still a large segment of people who want the graphics and the "hardcore" experiences of the PS3 and 360, but aren't willing to commit the capital. And let's face it: the so-called casual market, the one that plays Peggle and Bejeweled, is another group of people entirely. There's kind of a donut hole here.

But: the PlayStation 2 is actually still getting quite a bit of support, including Rock Band 2. You just can't download new tracks. And some noteworthy PC developers, like Valve and Blizzard, make sure to support lower-end systems, which means you don't need a cutting-edge system to play Left 4 Dead or World of Warcraft. Additionally, the Xbox 360 is rapidly approaching a true mass-market price point, so before long it may be a perfectly reasonable expenditure.

I think the most interesting part of this question is in the middle, though, about trying to learn how to play some of these new games. It's a real problem. I remember experiencing a moment of panic the first time I ever held the original Xbox controller, thinking "This is too much." But ultimately, playing games is work. They ask a lot of you. It's a matter of how much effort you're willing to put in to get out what's there.

I think the trick is to know what kind of complexity is right for you. For example, I'm fine at handling all the button combinations necessary to play a first-person shooter, but you can't streamline the interface of a strategy game enough for me. Think about it this way, too: you're a fan of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, but those certainly weren't easy to learn.

Danilo Vujevic really asked:

Do critic review scores actually mean anything?

A score can be helpful, but it's not the whole story. I make no secret of my love for Metacritic: it's an excellent way to get a snapshot of conventional wisdom. And it's often right. Games with a Metacritic score of 90 or above, in many cases, are games that I think are fully deserving. Having said that, I'm usually more interested in the score that goes completely against the grain. I'd rather read the dissenting view of a game like Fallout or Grand Theft Auto than another one that calls it the greatest game of all time. And I'm often intrigued when a game's Metacritic spread spans 40 points or more. So I guess I'd sum it up by saying that scores do mean something, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you rely on them exclusively.

Matthew Gallant asked:

What games do you feel are critically underappreciated? Games you loved that were overlooked by both bloggers and the gaming community at large.

I would have said both Yakuza and The Darkness, but at least in my circles those both seem to have gotten a little more attention recently. I still think they're both underrated and overlooked in the world at large, though. Both games have excellent stories starring fascinating lead characters, and showcase strong play mechanics. The Darkness, in particular, didn't get nearly enough credit for how well it executed its basic gameplay. Snaking along the ground as a tentacle before lashing up and eating an enemy's heart just never got old.

I'd love to dazzle you with some out-of-left-field pick from years ago, but my tastes have always run to the mainstream. Most of the games I'd pick are probably not under-represented in the hearts of people who read gaming blogs -- games like System Shock and (surprise!) The Secret of Monkey Island. But maybe you'd be surprised to learn of my deep, abiding love for FreeCell, the free Windows pack-in.

To be continued on Monday.

Rock Band 2: Why now?

Give me a choice between Rock Band and Guitar Hero, and I'll take the former every time. This despite the countless hours of entertainment the first two GH games gave me. That was the past. Now? Activision has ruined Guitar Hero. I don't know how to put it more plainly than that.

(Bill Harris does know how to put it more plainly, laying out in exquisite detail the destruction of the Guitar Hero brand.)

I'll grant that when Harmonix was at the GH reins, they still pinched off a stinker, but that one had "contractual obligation album" written all over it. Besides, by that point, they were hard at work on a much better game: Rock Band.

In the meantime, Activision had dished off Guitar Hero development to Neversoft, a company that knew a little something about running quality brands into the ground. (But let's be fair to Neversoft: The first several THPS games, which they created, were freakin' fantastic.)

This resulted in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, a game which was pleasant enough in its own right, but lacked the secret sauce that made its predecessors so great. Ultimately, it seemed that its developers weren't trying so much to replicate the feeling of playing these songs, but were trying to shoehorn them into a traditional skill-based gaming style, in which harder equaled better.

Most troubling was what GHIII seemed to portend. Instead of focusing on the music, the developers added features like the gimmicky boss battles, which no one enjoyed. Inevitably, the sideshow became the main attraction, and we were treated to Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Edition, which I have not played, and the full-on belly-flop of Guitar Hero: On Tour, which I have.

In the meantime, Rock Band came out and just pushed music. Each week, new tracks were available for download -- not costumes, not backgrounds, just songs. Some songs appeared in both games. In each case, the song was harder to play in Guitar Hero, and more fun to play in Rock Band.

Why?

Insult Swordfighting reader Iroqouis Pliskin actually asked the folks at Harmonix. It's not just how Harmonix draws up the note charts, although that's a big part of it. Song choice is also crucial. Their emphasis is less on pushing new, hot tracks. and instead "reflects a curatorial esteem for musicianship," in Pliskin's words. (Not that this excuses that bland new Motley Crue song.)

Strangely, with Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 4 poised to do battle this fall, it's Guitar Hero that seems more innovative, and not because they're stealing Rock Band's idea (except they're putting the cymbals above the drum pads, so it's, like, totally original). No, they're including a create-a-song feature, the first really good idea the series has had since the original, and the logical next step. I don't know how well it will work, but I know I want to try it.

By contrast, Rock Band 2 will have one feature it really should have had the first time around, and everything else new has only been hinted at. Maybe you'll be able to import tracks from your iPod. Everything else seems evolutionary. Improved peripherals are fine, online World Tour is helpful, and other than that we haven't heard much. (In fact, after paging through Google Reader, I'm not even sure if I've hallucinated the online World Tour functionality.)

My question: Does any of this stuff warrant a sequel? Particularly a full-priced sequel, to be released less than a year after the original? I'm not sure I follow the logic. Rock Band's DLC is a financial juggernaut. People are quite happy to keep forking over a few bucks for new songs. Much of what Harmonix seems to be promising for the sequel could probably be implemented on the software side via downloadable updates. Improved peripherals are welcome, but they hardly seem to justify the sequel treatment as would new instruments (I'm dying for some keyboards over here).

I'm afraid Harmonix might be applying an Activision-like squeeze to their property -- releasing a new game not because the world is ready for one, but because it's another calendar year and that's just what you do, dammit. Rock Band wasn't cheap, at about $170 for the game and all its controllers. Will the sequel also cost that much? What does that say to people who bought the game last year, expecting it to serve as a platform for years to come? Yes, I'm aware that both games will likely support future DLC. But by definition, Rock Band 2 will have to have exclusive new features, no?

Harmonix has earned the benefit of the doubt several times over. It's possible, even likely, that there are some terrific surprises in store. Still, one thing I never felt when the original Rock Band was announced was even a semblance of doubt. Rock Band 2 seems like too little, too soon.

A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Case Study: Guitar Hero

This is the fourth in an 11-part series. To start from the beginning, read part one: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Games." Or read the previous post, "Skill Players vs. Tourists."

A game doesn't get as loyal a following as the Guitar Hero series has unless it appeals to people with different tastes. We've tended to think that hardcore gamers and casual players have taken to the game in equal measure -- but, as stated in part two, those labels aren't specific enough for us to embrace. Instead, we'll look at how a Skill Player's approach to the game might differ from that of a Tourist. And we'll speculate as to what each player think he's accomplished afterward.

If you were to look at the screen during a game of Guitar Hero with the sound muted and the player out of sight, you'd see what appears to be a purely skill-based experience. Multi-colored gems stream down the screen in irregular patterns and need to be destroyed as they pass a static point. You'd quickly discern Guitar Hero's precise timing requirements, but from this perspective, it's hardly different from Space Invaders. Even if you weren't acquainted with the idiosyncrasies of the guitartroller, you'd guess the game required good hand-eye coordination, as well as manual dexterity. Even more so, you see the goal of the game to be detonating every single one of those gems. You're seeing the game through the point of view of the Skill Player.

Now imagine a different scenario: the sound is on, but your back is to the television and you're watching the Guitar Hero player. Exactly what he's doing when he holds down the buttons and hits the strum bar isn't quite clear, the one thing you can say for sure is that his actions drive the song you're hearing. Now he performs star power. You don't realize it's multiplying his score -- you just see him tilting the guitar like a rock star. The cause and effect relationship that you observe is the guitar controller producing rock and roll music. Things like the high score and the difficulty level are irrelevant here. Now you're looking at the game from the perspective of the Tourist.

It gets tricky when you're the one playing the game. Now, you have to synthesize visual stimuli (the streaming gems), digital manipulation (fret buttons and strum bar), and aural feedback (the song). The distinction between playing as a Skill Player and as a Tourist is harder to define, because their disparate motivations result in interlocked results. For a Skill Player, accurately detonating the gems makes the song sound correct. For a Tourist, playing the song well will naturally result in a good score. These two people may not realize they're playing for different reasons -- even if they're playing cooperatively!

How might we differentiate between Skill Players and Tourists in Guitar Hero? The intention of this piece is to suggest a better framework for talking about games, not to try to pigeonhole gamers, so I offer these suggestions only as a place to start -- to show how people could derive equal enjoyment with entirely different goals in mind. (It's also possible that someone could exhibit traits of both the Skill Player and the Tourist; in fact, I imagine most people do.)

Characteristics of the Skill Player in Guitar Hero:

• Plays on expert difficulty, or strives to
  
• Activates star power with the select button instead of tilting the controller
• Uses practice mode
• Pursues a five-star ranking in every song, even the terrible ones
• In multiplayer, prefers face-off or pro face-off
  

Characteristics of the Tourist in Guitar Hero:

• Plays on whatever difficulty they've mastered (this could still be expert)
• Activates star power by tilting the controller
• Learns songs by playing them
• Disproportionately plays the songs they like
• Prefers co-op multiplayer
  

Defining people simply by these traits may be problematic, because to do so is to attribute motivation to action after the fact. But if you know that you fit more comfortably in one category, you may be able to apply that perspective to other games where the dichotomy is less obvious.

The question now is whether we've taken this to its logical conclusion. I think there's further still to go.

Next: Skill Players: Drilling Down

Sometimes it is that simple

Gamasutra is running an excerpt from the book Inside Game Design that features an interview with Guitar Hero dev Rob Kay. There's a lot of interesting stuff there for people who want to know how games are made, but I thought the most interesting part was this almost throwaway bit about Guitar Hero's appeal:

It was pretty fun; the controller really was the kind of magic sauce for what we wanted to do. It's very difficult to make games attractive and accessible, and I'm sure that 90% of what draws people into Guitar Hero is that plastic guitar. They instantly say, "I get it! I pretend to be a guitarist!"

Obviously this is much like what Nintendo was getting at with the Wii, but it can be easy to forget that when non-gamers look at somebody playing a game, they don't see those virtual worlds we get lost in, or the infinite calculations passed back and forth between our brains and the system's. They see some guy holding a remote control and staring into space.