Guest User

reHASHplus

Sober IT truths from the island-state

by Michael Tan, Singapore

Subscribe to this blog

The rarity of engaging content and Guitar Hero 3

Mar 3, 2008 13:58

By any standard, the 21st century is the time of "Plenty" from the content perspective. There is so much content, we have to filter away 99 percent of it or more, as life's just too short to go through everything. Any song, movie, TV series, game, book, magazine, anything at all, is available from the Net if you look hard enough.

With so much content, it is so much harder to be fully immersed or engaged with the content, compared to the last time. In the 1970s, Space 1999 was one of the rare shows which was somewhat interesting, but with today's high standards, it just sucks. I TRIED to watch reruns of Six Million Dollar Man, and I realized that it sucked and wondered why I just loved that show when I was young.

I guess with so much content available, our standards have increased proportionately, raising the bar for engaging content.

So here I was, happily going about my life without much engaging music (my car radio is permanently tuned to BBC) for the last few years. I'm not tone deaf, I had formal classical music training, I have probably listened to every song ever sung, at least once, from shopping centers, friends' cars, radios, etc. But none engaged me.

Then I visited my colleague's house on Saturday, and had nothing much to do since I suck at engaging others in polite conversation. He had a Wii, with a standard Guitar Hero 3. Les Paul guitar beside it, so I turned it on.

Hmm... Black Magic Woman by Santana... let's see how well I could play this thing.

500 finger presses, strums, over 200 whammy oscillations later, I had to sit down and catch my breath. I've never, ever appreciated Black Magic Woman like this. I was utterly engaged, listening to every beat, every note, and feeling the rhythm of the music in my soul. It didn't matter whether the sound came from S$20 shitty speakers or S$10,000 audiophile speakers made of gold. I was totally immersed.

I went to the stores immediately and bought GH3 for my PS3, rushed home and put it on. And I finished 50 percent of Easy Career in one night. I stood up, bent down, closed my eyes when playing, bent my knees, everything a guitar hero would do, alone at night. I had the best music experience of my life, short of being intoxicated at a rock concert.

Guitar Hero 3, to me, is not a game. It's a new way to listen to music, to be with the music, to be totally engaged. Once you're in the zone, you'd get close to 100 percent perfect performance without consciously hitting the buttons, but at the same time your mind is tasting the music nude, subconsciously enjoying the clever and devilishly mathematical frequency relationships of the note and rhythm progression, so intimate with the song that you're almost having sex with it.

GH3 has fulfilled my fantasies. I play keyboards well, but my guitar skills aer so meager, I can't even reach 1 percent satisfaction. Look, I even envy Jack Black from the movie School of Rock. Now that I've reached this stage of immersion, the next step is probably to learn the instruments and play them for real, which is so daunting that I hope they invent some new way to cheat, so I can get better immersion without actually having to learn to play the guitar.

For now, Guitar Hero 3 is probably state-of-the-art in music listening. Not the iPod, not those in-ear earphones, not the S$100,000 Mark Levinson sound system. Guitar Hero 3 beats them all hollow.

Just play it LOUD.

Casey Lynch Guitar Hero 3

Doesn't hurt that Casey Lynch is so pornified with such cool moves...

« Prev

Report offensive

Talkback

There are currently no comments for this post.

About Michael Tan

Michael Tan is lucky enough not to have to choose between his job and his passion. He is the responsible for all aspects of developing new businesses and sourcing new productlines for a regional IT distribution company. He also oversees the company's legal affairs as General Counsel. In real life, he is a technology enthusiast, from both the fun and business viewpoint. The only choices he has to make are whether to play with his astro telescopes, his PC games, his Wii console, hit the track, tweak his car, or refine his biofilters, post his blogs, research for a new digicam, scour every forum to feed his habit further, play with his son… You can reach Michael at michaeltanyk@gmail.com ALL BLOGPOSTS ONLY REFLECT MICHAEL'S OPINIONS AND NOBODY ELSES'.