I get that this is just a game but I seriously think if you’re going to spend so much time playing a fake instrument, you might as well learn to play the real thing. As for speed - shredding anyone?
You could argue the same with almost every other game thats a copy of real life actions. Racing, Soccer, Martial Arts games... the list is long and does not even end with FPS games. There was lots of arguing the early days of "killer games" if they actually make people violent. No they don't. Competitive FPS games were and are about skills and being better, faster and able to outplay your opponent.
My GFs sisters family was all about classical music education and her sister is already known international for playing her instrument. She also plays guitar hero (and competitive FPS shooter). Its just an entirely different skillset. Guitar hero needs absolutely no education in any music stuff, therefore the entry level is much much lower.
You cannot really compare it. Guitar hero is like mastering any other video game like tetris or pong. Mastering a music instrument is another level of education. At least yet. Sooner or later it will comparable maybe. When children start to play a video game with the age of like 4 and keep doing it basically their entire life 6+ hours a day - that's the amount of time a professional classical musician invests in their profession.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.f1-esports-gradua...
Still, there's an important rhythm element to it. I'd assume musicians or people who have a good sense of rhythm are at an advantage.
I'm not saying there isn't any transferable skills what-so-ever but being good at one doesn't automatically mean you have an advantage at the other.
Well. You could say timing =~ rhythm. So yes and no. I'am pretty sure - correct me if iam wrong - that guitar hero pros watch the screen and don't listen to the music. Makes it also easier to adapt to (way) higher speeds than 100%.
With a plastic guitar, you're right. But plastic drumset skills are transferrable to a real instrument.
Being an excellent GH drummer might make you (a mediocre) drummer IRL. Being an excellent GH guitar player won't make you even a beginner guitar player IRL. It's not "an entirely different skillset", it's a relevantly close skillset as long as drums are affected.
While superficially it might look the same, drumming isn’t just about hitting objects in time. How you hit those objects is what really matters but GH doesn’t train that skill.
It is absurd to say you can not compare these things. Utterly absurd.
It is exactly like spending time in car driving simulator instead of actually learning to drive car.
Your point makes zero sense. I don't even think you believe this because comparing video game soccer or martial arts to actually playing soccer or fighting is just stupid.
Thats not remotely comparable with playing guitar trying to replicate what you see on a screen with a few buttons. But I will not argue with a guy that just called my opinion "just stupid".
Also:
> because comparing video game soccer or martial arts to actually playing soccer or fighting
Thats not what I did.
He is playing “real guitar hero” not fake guitar hero or simulated guitar hero. Playing the guitar and playing guitar hero are not the same despite containing similar looking elements. In one case the target is to produce music, in the other it’s to produce points or a high score. He doesn’t care about producing music, he cares about producing a high score. Likewise, the musician’s aim isn’t to be better at scoring points, it’s to be better at producing music.
To use another game, one could say “why play Madden when you could play ‘real’ football?” Madden IS real. Is it football, no. It’s a game. But that’s OK. Football is a game, Madden is a game, but they are different games. The aim of playing Madden isn’t to become the next great linebacker for the Chicago Bears, it’s to be better at playing Madden.
Chess is an example outside of video games. It’s said that chew is a simulation of war. But people don’t play chess to become better generals and generals don’t play chess to become better at winning wars. They are each their own thing.
I really enjoy watching sports (pretty much every sport, although I’m a partial to college football) and played sports as a kid but it’s much harder to do as I get older for the obvious physical reasons and the fact that adults don’t have the coordinated free time and schedules of children.
Video games are a much more accessible medium. I see my 8 year old nephew play video games and watch streamers. He can then play the same game for himself. As much as I loved watching Michael Jordan as a kid I could never, and will never, be able to dunk a basketball. There barriers to entry for video games is much lower, almost anyone can do it, such that it’s practically zero. It’s much more relatable and as he gets older I think he’ll choose to watch people compete in the things he grew up with and relates to. Given the shear number of people to game it’s not unimaginable to see how e-sports could surpass professional sports one day.
The RB team had this vision that the game was a mind trick to maybe get people into music, with a low barrier to entry, ramping up all the way to RB3's pro guitar (the one with 6 strings and the full fret board, that ends up showing actual chords on screen), pro keyboard, pro drum set, and so on. Of course it's useless to pretend this makes you learn the real instruments, still you get to approach key things like pacing yourself, rhythm, strumming, song structure, pattern matching, rehearsing, talking to your band members... all while having a damn fun time.
And dare I say, this was a success, at least for one of my friends and his family. I showed him RB1, he enjoyed it so much that the next day he bought a X360+game+accessories, started playing it, and pulled along his wife and two daughters, where they rotated instruments in turn. As they ramped up through the whole RB saga up to RB3, they thought "it's so fun playing this game together, kinda like being a band!". Next thing you know they picked up real instruments and started an actual band.
I myself picked up the guitar much more easily, not because of any technique learned (because the game is incredibly different from the real thing still) but because it made me raise in confidence that this was approachable.
It's entirely possible that, had Harmonix developed GH3, it may have been a full-band game. We do know that they considered drums as early as post-GH1 development, there exist a whole array of drum gems in the 4-song OPM GH2 demo, as well as some leftover code fragments (for example, there is an entire DrumTrackWatcher class with several functions like AddFills and AddLanes, and the OPM demo build itself actually also at some level checks for Konami/Topway drums for PS1 DrumMania, and has controller detection script that recognizes Topway drums).
GH2 also has leftover "band_version.dta" files that, across all builds of GH2 and GH80s that we have, always contains the same contents: "Build: 060302_A" (HMX dated these builds YYMMDD, best we can tell). band_version.dta is the file later used in the Rock Band series to contain the build date. There is also a separate file "gh2_version.dta" that is different between PS2 4-song, PS2 10-song, PS2 retail, 360 retail, 360 10-song, PS2 GH80s press review, and PS2 GH80s retail. I'm pretty sure there exists within Harmonix, a disc with that very build date written on the label (including the A, which I feel signifies that they'd burnt a second distinct build that day), and my feeling is that if we had that disc, it would have whatever drum support active that they had at the time. Perhaps 060302 doesn't have drums active, but 060302_A was a branch that did? No way to know unless someone steals those binders from HMX and leaks them to us (fat chance lol) or HMX themselves decide to open up their archives to our dataminers.
That's cool. Uh... Who's "we"?
"We" are a small team of people who make mods to older Harmonix games. RB2 Deluxe is a free patch for modded 360/PS3 that adds a lot of quality-of-life features to the game. https://rb2-deluxe.neocities.org/
I don't know if they've fixed it but I did try version 1 of Rocksmith, a game that's supposed to teach you actual guitar. Unfortunately, the first song was playable by a noob. The 2nd song was impossible for a noob. And that was the end of that.
Maybe they've fix it, or maybe I suck, or maybe some people plow on anyway.
In many cases the more simulation-focused games are used by people who really like racing cars, or flying planes, or driving tractors, or whatever, but can't do it as much or in the expensive equipment they'd physically prefer.
There is a lot of variance in games as to the fidelity of what they're representing. Most shooters won't teach you anything about real firearms or bows and arrows and most racing games have little to do with real cars, but there are flight sims that have physics and controls directly modeled on real equipment.
There have been real piano training games. I'd imagine any instrument could be with modern audio sampling and analysis if people wanted to pay for it.
It’s actually pretty fun. Though I haven’t played in a few years. You could buy new songs once you finished the initial ones. They’re at various difficulties and you get more notes as you level up.
“Rocksmith”
Now on steam apparently https://store.steampowered.com/app/221680/Rocksmith_2014_Edi...
For drumming /finger drumming/keyboard there is
Which is pricy / less game like but I did it for a year.
Sarcasm aside, most people can’t just pick up a guitar, find a full band, book a gig, etc. That’s one of the main reasons we even have video games. To “do” stuff we can’t do in our lives.
I love Stardew Valley. Should I sell my possessions, leave my family, and go start a new life in a small town as a farmer/dungeon diver/beer brewer?
There's a scene where one of the kids plays an acoustic set of guitar hero, and people listen deeply and applaud him tapping on an unplugged guitar hero controller.
I play Guitar Hero for the flow state it can induce for me. It's one hell of a way to enjoy a remarkably wide range of music.
Rocksmith would definitelly be harder since you have to produce clean tones for game to recognize. Correct fretting and picking... But you'll have some real guitar skills when you turn off the game.
As a not-so-skilled guitar player, I found Rocksmith to greatly improve my rhythm and to teach me a valuable lesson of "show must go on". When you play alone and make a mistake it's natural to stop and redo that last part. But that's not how you can play with others and not the way you can play Rocksmith. So it teaches you to keep playing whatever happens.
Aparth from these aspects, which are important, I didn't learn much more from Rocksmith. Yes, it does have some musical lessons but my general feeling is that it leads you to follow patterns that scroll down, and not to think about notes/chords/scales involved.
Arguably this depends on how you learn and memorize, but I don't think you can discount the visual element of playing instruments. We do have the dots in the fretboard after all.
What I meant to say is that I looked at the guitar a whole lot when I was starting, but then I spent years playing without looking at the fretboard, often while laying in bed. At first I -had- to look at the fretboard and strings to play properly.
Still, it's not as lush feedback as a video game.