Guitar Anti-Hero

I am a seasoned guitar player, and I think that the twenty-plus years of plucking and fretting under my belt undoubtably contribute to my disdain for the phenomenon known as Guitar Hero. 

Make no mistake - I am a fan of electronic gaming.  I have a great deal of experience with flight simulators, racing games, first-person shooters, and the like.  And I have enjoyed them all greatly. 

But I scoff and harrumph at these wannabe-rock stars, what with their feeble, phallic, plastic, oversized joysticks, and the way they feverishly slap and beat at them, staring wide-eyed at the television, watching a multicolored stream of digital M&M's flow down the screen.

They actually have the nerve to post videos of their triumphs to YouTube, as though they have achieved something great.

My Lady Friend thinks it represents an interesting clash between my love of computers - the ultimate enabling technology - and my long-standing love of the art of music.  In a nutshell, computers enable these mouth-breathing yashcos to feel some sense of what a musician feels to play a piece of music.  In reality, it's nothing like playing a song.

Unlike a flight simulator, where the bulk of the actions involved may actually give you some sense of how to pilot an airplane, the motions and actions in Guitar Hero prepare you not the slightest fraction for how to actually play a piece of music.  Likewise, with a racing game, you can get some sense of how to successfully pilot an automobile around a track at a different speed - yet all Guitar Hero will do is teach you how to flail - meaninglessly - at a guitar.

Furthermore - it diminishes the art of playing guitar, by turning it into an objectively-measured sport.  While some may look at it that way - most musicians and music lovers will tell you there are no measurable ways of determining guitar greatness.  The greatness is measured within - from the heart.

At the end of one such GH video on YouTube was a scorecard showing "Notes Hit".  It stated that he was over 90% correct, having hit over 1000 notes.  I would point out that he was 0% correct - having hit no notes whatsoever.  Plastic buttons, yes - but not a single note.