Rock Band and the Curse of Knowledge

Down in DC over the weekend, I was able to spend some time playing Rock Band at my friend Matt's place.  I've often wondered what its like to be a professional or college athlete playing yourself in a game where your skills are vastly underrated.  Rock Band gave me that experience. 

I've been drumming for nearly 20 years, and while I'm no Neal Peart, I can hold my own.  However, as Rock Band was designed with non-musicians in mind (probably?), they had to translate the actual music into a notation system that non-musicians could understand.  This involves simplifying the music so that its possible for people to actually play it (below), and in order to create a drumming controller, they had to simplify the idea of a drumset (above).

If you haven't played it, it's essentially electronic whack-a-mole with a rock and roll setting.  The notes stream down the guitar necks depicted at the bottom of the screen, and when they cross the bar at the bottom you have to hit the correct note.   If you miss or hit the wrong note, you hear a little scratch noise and the part that you are playing stops...and if you do it enough the crowd starts to boo, you get kicked stage and (although this part isn't depicted in the game) you end up working in advertising.

So here's the problem for those who are well versed in actually playing music:  as the music is simplified for non-musicians, the notes the game wants you to play are slightly different than the actual notes of the song.  A fill that is four 8th notes on the snare might be one note on the red plastic drum.  This causes confusion, and mistakes and the loss of sanity as your screaming "but I played the actual pattern correctly!" as you're run out of town on a rail for actually knowing how to play Wave of Mutilation.  Meanwhile, the 10 year old who has never heard any of these songs outside of the game, let alone ever even seen a drum set in person, rokks a perfect score every time.  The curse of knowledge indeed. 

I was going to relate this to how planners are supposed to stay dumb, but I think it reminds me a little bit of the effects that open source culture is having on the "professionals".  So I'm going to go way out on a ridiculous limb here.   Feel free to stop reading when your eyes achieve full-rollitude. 

<crackpot theory> As it becomes simpler for people to create things (music, videos, art) thanks to technology, the less and less we're going to need people with expertise in the creative fields ... presumably.  And as the output norm becomes more closely aligned with the aesthetics of the masses  and their simplified tools rather than the refined professionals with expensive "pro-gear", it could be that all of that time invested in learning how to make proper creative things actually end up just making people into bumbling fossils from another time.  Sort of the way Nirvana's sloppy authentic noise made every technically complex Van-Halen guitar solo seem tacky and dated. </crackpot theory>

Comments

[niko]

Actually not so crackpotish. perhaps a bit elitist thinking of mine, but I see it becoming true. Of course the way nature works this will be balanced out again. By the age of craftsmen. This is something I am still trying to conceptualize, but basically the masses will dumb down, but that will lead to frustration amongst the few in the masses who have real desires to produce great work and to better themselves. they will always stay the course in a certain field. So as the masses move on to the next thing, what u got left is a few good pro-ams and the proffesionals. Because for all the sloppy sound of nirvana, they were craftsmen influenced by a wide range of music + the beatles. all that came after them was influenced by Nirvana. It like a mixtape back in the day, the copy of the copy of the copy gets so bad, that you trhrow it away, and buy the original album.. so the dumber stuff gets the brighter the future. the dark ages came before the renaissance.

[Rural Cemetery Movements]

more like neal peart is no k2

[Kevin]

Interesting thought about the dark ages coming before the Renaissance.