Continuing this week’s theme of great music, good gameplay: Guitar Hero II, the first of the major rhythm games that caught and held my attention. After the flurry of World Tour playing in this household, I missed the music in this other game. A shame that one can’t port tracks between titles – not that there’s any shortage of rock to go around.

I’ve already talked about tipping points and popularity with World Tour, but Guitar Hero II makes me wonder in a more personal sense. Assume, as I have, that the game works because it makes you feel cool, lets you tap into that rock star fantasy with no more than a basic understanding of rhythm and the ability to push some buttons. At what point does each of us make the leap to feeling cool from “Okay, I’ll wear this bright red, plastic kiddie guitar- in front of my friends, no less – and pretend to play it.” Yes, you can buy more a more serious, adult guitar now….but this is the default controller, this flimsy, undersized anathema. I don’t think we could look less like rock stars if we tried.

And yet, that physicality is what makes the game work on a fundamental level. Holding a normal controller, as we do with every fighting, platforming, and shooting game out there, wouldn’t have anywhere near the same kind of gut emotional response for me that I get when I’m holding something that, for all intents and purposes, is a guitar. It’s one gimmick that doesn’t feel like a gimmick – rather, it feels necessary. And yet, it was embarrassing that first time to pull that cheap strap over my head and stand there as if I was holding a real instrument, and tap along to something written by Motley Crue or Nirvana or Rage Against the Machine.

I’ve thought this before, but “fun”, as we define it in practice, seems to have a large element of “potentially humiliating and patently ridiculous.”

Perhaps that’s part of it: that we do these silly things, and let other people see us doing these silly things, and are unashamed. There’s enjoyment in nonsense, in letting go of all things serious – and it is certainly not serious to play Guitar Hero. And yet, in the moment of playing, we take it very seriously, as a challenge we enjoy working through. Excepting, of course, those of us playing Buckethead’s “Jordan” on Expert. (That damnable track! If “Freebird” is the final boss fight, “Jordan” is that worthless optional boss that is so ridiculously hard, so laughably out of balance with the rest of the game, that the rewards for winning are by definition useless, and only the zealot uberfans even bother. …Maybe I’ll beat it this week.)

I’ll say as well that given the nature of the Guitar Hero series, I prefer the multiplayer experience. Yes, there is a duelling guitars mode in II, but it’s not the same as when three or four of us are “playing” together – in every sense of the word. I know my biases, and I’m certainly a singleplayer gamer by trade – but here, I’m not as deeply immersed or single-mindedly challenged as I am in my complex, highly narrative platformers or action games. Here I want to argue about which track to play next, to complain about Significant Tim’s lousy taste in classic rock, to save the band by hitting a perfect streak of notes at just the right time….It’s not as fun playing guitar by yourself. Although I’d still like the option, for those times when everyone else is busy or I just a few tracks to myself. Which says something about both the genre and the medium of music, I think.

Now, if they’d only start working on Jazz Hero… Buckethead’s got nothing on Charlie Parker.

The Guitar Hero series always makes me think about tipping points. The technology is nothing new – we’ve had it for fifteen years. Rhythm games are nothing new. The music itself, in fact, is nothing new (one of the series’ main selling points). The original Guitar Hero was innovative not for what it did but for making the rhythm genre mainstream, for popularizing it both critically and commercially. I’ve always felt that so many games are power fantasies at heart: we want to save the princess and the world, kill the bad guys, feel cool. Guitar Hero plays into that same fantasy, but rather than Conan the Barbarian, James Bond, or Batman, this time we get to be Jimi Hendrix or Axl Rose. And part of me always thinks, of course we want to be rock stars too. Why didn’t anyone think of this before?

I have a hard time keeping GH World Tour separate in my mind from Rock Band (do non-gamers have the same problems telling Half-Life, Far Cry, and Gears of War apart?). Essentially, one to four players can take up the traditional instruments: guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, and play along by pressing buttons according to the rhythms on screen. This would never work with a standard controller – part of feeling cool (and also a bit ridiculous, which I suppose is one of the definitions of fun) is that you’re actually holding and strumming a guitar,  singing into a mic, or hitting the pads of a drumset. I have never in my life sat down in front of a set, but World Tour contains none of the hard work of actual drumming. As a pianist, I can use both my hands and my feet at the same time, and I can keep time – and that’s all it takes to get to the flailing sticks and the driving beat. For obvious reasons, this is a game best played with friends.

I have a number of colleagues in sound design and recorded music who find the games fascinating simply because they exist. Every now and then someone asks me about one of these “music” games, and I have to explain that it has nothing to do with making music, learning to play music, or even music appreciation. The beauty of the Guitar Hero series, particularly World Tour, is that you can feel like Buckethead without having to be as talented as Buckethead – the same thing stealth and action games have been mining for mechanics for years. In effect, you “win” by managing to keep the music from stopping, not by adding anything original to it yourself. And that’s fine. It’s actually one of the best party games I’ve seen in years, particularly for large groups – whoever wants to play is in charge of keeping the music going. And as World Tour includes tracks from rock, pop, country, and metal, it’s not hard to find songs that appeal to everyone’s musical taste – at the very least, songs that are more party-friendly than the background music for Smash Bros. levels.

Of course, there are always down sides. My iTunes playlist has certainly expanded, and there’s always the danger of falling in love with a song before you realize it’s being sung by a bunch of emo German teenagers with a screaming, tweeny fanbase (which doesn’t stop me from taking Monsoon off my playlist). But I’m mostly waiting to hear from the guitar instructors. How many students will swagger into their classes explaining that they’re already ahead because they can play World Tour on expert mode?