I am sorry that I have to bring up Nickelback here, but this thing they said on Leno just gets me so angry. Even angrier than I usually am at Nickelback, which for the record is “pretty angry.”
But that’s not game-related bile. This is, though: Chad Kroeger told Jay Leno he wants kids to stop playing Guitar Hero and start up real bands. This in and of itself is not a horrible thing to say: apparently Kroeger is having trouble finding bands that are willing to interact with Nickelback, but rather than thinking that is a problem with his own band or his own douchey personality he is rationalizing it away as “there aren’t enough rock bands out there these days.”
But his statement is also based on another fallacy—that a significant number of talented musicians are lost to the world because they get their fix from rhythm games. You hear this all the time, and it is crazy and must be stopped.
Rhythm games are for people like me: those who enjoy music, but don’t have any particular talent for it or drive to create it, to get some simulacrum of a rush we could otherwise never know. They are also for musicians, who can use it to interact with the music they love in a low stress way.
What rhythm games absolutely do not do is scratch the itch musicians have to learn instruments, and to use them to create music. I guess I should not expect Nickelback, a band that has never created “music” as I define it, to understand this. But let’s put it this way: I have never known anyone that has played the guitar, who has stopped playing that guitar after being introduced to Rock Band. On the other hand, I do know people who played Rock Band and found in them a passion that caused them to learn the real guitar.
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