Activision announced recently that they are pulling the plug on their popular "Guitar Hero" game franchise. After several versions of the original GH game and many copycat followups, the games have oversaturated the market and run their course.
The passing of the GH franchise made me think about the impact the game has had on music and on potential musicians (i.e., the kids who grew up playing the game in any of its incarnations). I've talked with other musicians who instantly dismiss the entire franchise ("it doesn't teach real music"), to others who embraced it for what it was: a clever and fun exercise in hand-eye coordination. I think that folks who sound off against GH because it "doesn't teach real music" miss the point (it was never meant to be a music education game in the first place), but I also think there are some elements of music that you can pick up while playing the game: specifically rhythm and pitch relativity.
Learning rhythm is a skill that I've seen young musicians struggle with, no matter how well they can read music and play it on their chosen instrument. It's one thing to be able to read and differentiate between 8th and 16th note patterns, but it's something else entirely to be able to count and keep good time while playing those notes. One of the features of the GH games was that the "notes" you played always came at you in rhythmic patterns that matched the tempo of the song you were playing and which directly related to the actual rhythms that sounded from the music. Put another way, the game emphasized the rhythm of the notes rather than the actual notes themselves - in many ways I thought the game would actually be a good introduction to percussion, even though I'm not a percussionist...any drummers reading this post, feel free to sound off on that idea.
The second musical element that I believe you could learn from the GH games was the relativity of pitches. While the game never dealt with actual musical notes, it did present the concept of pitches and their relationship to one another (intervals, scales, chords) in an interesting graphical manner. Low notes were always played on the "low buttons" of the guitar controller and the high notes were always played on the "higher buttons". I suppose that the game did emulate the concept of a guitar neck in that respect. But more than that, the game actually attempted to space the "notes" you would play in a manner that almost made sense, musically; notes that came at you at specific intervals (thirds, fifths, etc) were translated to the controller's buttons in a way that conveyed the actual musical distance between those notes. As you played a guitar solo that featured an ascending scale run, the "notes" were presented in an ascending pattern that you followed on the controller. Granted, the controller only had 6 buttons so the range of notes that could be mapped to the controller was limited...but the idea was musically correct. Even chords were played by holding down more than one button at a time, conveying the concept that a chord is made up of two or more notes played simultaneously.
I think that young kids who grew up playing these games will at least be a little more prepared for the real thing when they put down the plastic controllers, pick up an actual guitar and sign up for lessons. To that end, I think the GH games were a good introduction to some of the mechanics of music. And if by playing those games, a kid's interest in learning real music has been sparked, then I think it's been a positive influence.
