The End of Guitar Hero (11 Feb 2011)

As I get most of my cultural news from Carles, I just found out the other day that Activision is discontinuing Guitar Hero. This comes on the heels of Viacom's announcing its intentions to sell off its Harmonix unit, which put out the Rock Band games. Part of what did these franchises in was rising licensing costs, which seems somewhat insane when you think about the promotional benefits of having your music in a game. But mainly it seems as though the market had become saturated, and consumers have moved on from the musician-simulation fad.

Does this make for a better world? I wonder whether this news sinks my "dangerous allure of dilettantism" thesis that I floated in January 2009 -- only two years ago these music games seemed to me emblematic of our culture's war on difficulty and its eagerness to celebrate simulacra of skills as all that we ordinary people can and should aspire to. Leave the real practice to professionals; just pretend to learn how to do things and have fun! Basically, the thrill of mastering some activity and the ephemeral joys of consumption seem opposed, and obviously manufacturers have every incentive to persuade us to choose the latter. And we save precious consuming time by deriving a denatured kind of mastery through the acquisition of goods rather than earning demonstrable mastery through the arduous acquisition of skills.

In some ways the danger presented by dilettante games has been supplanted by the gamification trend, which turns mostly mundane tasks into competitive arenas in order to extract more labor out of what are usually volunteers. For example, gamification is at play when websites assign points for checking in with them (as with Foursquare's juvenile mayubinatorial races) or simply meter how many times users do a certain task (as when Netflix tells you "You've rated 543 movies"). Whenever consumers are duped into trying to level up or earn a badge, gamification methods are being deployed.

Gamification is powerfully manipulative, tapping into the apparently insatiable human appetites for attention, self-monitoring, praise and hierarchy establishment. Video games are pretty close to engineered addiction; they are carefully designed to parcel out rewards in a manner that maintains optimal frustration. Ideally this addictive potential can be harnessed to positive ends. What was so confusing to me about Guitar Hero was that it didn't trick you into practicing guitar (like a touch-typing game or language flash cards or something); it did the exact opposite. It gave you game mechanics that prompted you into developing more or less useless button-mashing prowess. Guitar Hero supplied the engineered feeling of mastery as a product, as something readily available and more or less guaranteed, whereas guitar practice is often humbling and gives you little sense of mastery for a long time, just calluses.

In this Kotaku article, "Video Games Keep Tricking Us Into Doing Things We Loathe," Leigh Alexander suggests that "an addictive game is simply a set of activities that plays into the human brain's reward center without offering the person anything." The decentralized social-factory space of the Web has now adopted that logic to motivate a volunteer labor force, giving us game mechanics that get us to do stuff that is lucrative for other companies while supplying a fleeting public ego boost to us at best. Alexander warns of the possibility that "we've become so dependent on designed interaction, compulsion loops and receiving positive feedback for everything that we can't just exist spontaneously, that we need to be 'tricked' into achieving." That is, gamification may strip us of our natural ability to become motivated, of setting goals for ourselves, of being able to autonomously find meaning in what we work at. Gamification makes us all less dilettantes than crackheads.

Guitar Hero was symptomatic of that shift, with its assumption that we care more about the ersatz rewards than acquired skills. But novelty was its main allure, not its tie-in with music. People have tired of that motif and have moved on to other kinds of games that give the same thrill in a superficially different package. It seems apropos at this point to cite Dave, the guru in my favorite film, Psych-Out: "All the games have to go man because it's all one big plastic hassle."

Simulating yourself (6 November 2006)

Sometimes I have to cast about for topics to write about, but sometimes they come right to my door in the morning, gift-wrapped. In today's Wall Street Journal is this story about how real rock stars enjoy playing the game "Guitar Hero," which allows them to pretend to be rock stars. In other words, they prefer to play the video-game simulation of their life rather than live life itself.

For many rock musicians, the game's virtual stage would seem to be a pale, unsatisfying facsimile of what they experience every night. The music they're playing along with usually isn't even an original recording. Most of the songs in Guitar Hero have been re-recorded by studio musicians.
Many professional rockers, however, say the game lets them act out a fantasy that their real lives don't quite match. Sometimes, pretending to be a rock star for a few minutes can be more fun than being one.

Rock stars escape from the pressure of their actual lives to a simulated version of the very same life. Is this just a tragic lack of imagination? Maybe by escaping into an idealized form of your own life, you reinforce the ultimate desirability of the profession you've chosen or fallen into. It is akin to athletes who enjoy playing the EA Sports versions of their profession, and anyone who has spent any time playing the Sims. You want to remind yourself that what you do is so important that other people have taken the trouble to meticulously replicate it.

Perhaps the impulse to play a simulation of one's own life comes from a desire to simplify the variables involved and achieve a greater sense of control over that life as it is regressed into fantasy. The mediated simulacrum of life experience has defined the pleasures of experience in such a way that actual experience can no longer live up to it. The experience of fantasy is more pleasant than actually doing anything you might fantasize about, because so many more elements of the fantasy ultimately remain under the dreamers control, and having control has become the ur-pleasure, perhaps because society celebrates autonomy and mastery while undermining our chances to achieve it.

Even for rock stars and athletes apparently it's not enough to demonstrate their unique skills for massive audiences; this still pales in the face of the total systematic mastery games promise hints of (and use stimulus-reward inducements derived from behavioral psychology to deliver). The unambiguous success of the game world is preferable to the compromised ambivalent successes available to us in real life (where we must share the credit and acknowledge luck's role for the partial victories we can secure). The pleasures of shopping -- if sociologist Colin Campbell is correct -- have a great deal to do with the ability to foster elaborate fantasies about goods. Perhaps as we become habituated to this method of producing a sense of value for things, we seek to apply it to the particulars of our own actions. We look to apply it to the course our entire lives and not just the stuff we buy.

Still, you don't have to be Baudrillard to note the peculiarity of this shift away from the real into hyperreality. But in Simulacra and Simulation, he gives the classic explanation of this phenomena when discussion Disneyland: You can produce an astute analysis of how Disneyland "represents" America, "but this conceals something else, and that 'ideological' blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral)." The video-game version of rock stardom conceals how much of a synthetic, contrived game actual rock stardom is. The Sims protects from seeing how regimented and manufactured our own lives are by putting us in control of radically simplified versions of those constitutive elements.(Not that profound an insight, I guess, but worth noting.)

As fun as it might be to play yourself in a video game, the awareness of your own simulation potentially creates anxiety, because it seems to suggest that life can go on without you; that anyone can be put in your shoes and make you essentially superfluous. Baudrillard suggests as much, anyway: "It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have to be produced: this is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection which no longer leaves any chance even in the event of death." Even if the guys from Korn and My Chemical Romance should die, we can still access the crux of their experience through this PlayStation game (and videos and recordings of them and through the ways their image has been constructed and mediated in all of society's various disseminating structures, etc.). Perhaps these games make rock stars feel as though they have been cloned; maybe this makes them feel a touch more immortal.