Guitar Hero Breeds a New Kind of Bar Band

Anthony Wegmann, one of Lucky's owners, says that his club has seen an upswing in business on Rock Band night. "The last couple of weeks we have started getting phone calls from people wanting to know what time we start playing," he says. "...It's not quite as good as a live band, but it is at least some form of entertainment, whereas we would just be having reruns of SportsCenter on ESPN otherwise."

Plenty, say some musicians and music teachers. But even most of them reluctantly agree that the games are fun.

Allen Hill, the antic frontman for the Allen Oldies Band who also teaches guitar and plays guitar and bass in several other cover bands, is in the anti-camp. He believes that any time spent playing the game could be better spent learning to play the guitar for real.

"Videogames didn't create the need to play guitar or make a band," he says. "All this stuff can be done; you've just got to apply yourself and really want to do it."

Guitarist/singer Jaime Marroquin, who as "Jaime Hellcat" leads Houston "vato-billy" band Flamin' Hellcats, has played the game and says that he is "terrible" at it. Even so, he enjoys the game and says it is not without its benefits.

"I think it does give non-musicians a sense of what it feels like to be onstage in a band, especially a terrible band," he says.

In the game, when you hit too many duff notes in a row, the song ends abruptly, the crowd boos unmercifully and silence, interrupted only by the crackling hum of an amp, descends, as your character hangs his head in shame.

"I have been in some terrible bands in my time, and it feels a lot like that," Marroquin says. "Now people know what it feels like to suck in a band."

And he also feels the inverse is true. "Or when you are kicking ass, that high you get. There's nothing like it."

That may be so, Hill believes, but he thinks that Guitar Hero devotees are cheating themselves out of some of the best parts of life as a musician. "A big part of playing music is that you are in an ensemble and you are playing with humans," he says. "Nothing against technology, but in some ways I feel these games cheapen the experience a little bit."

No matter what you think about the game's ability to re-create life as a musician, few people will argue that Rock Band and the Guitar Hero series are masterpieces as pure videogames. Both of them demolish all the rules of gaming.

Chad Edwards, one of the Rock Band-loving patrons at Lucky's, says that Rock Band is one game that gets you out of the house. "I don't know this guy or that guy"—he points to two of his virtual bandmates—"but we've all played Guitar Hero and we've all played Rock Band, and this is just another way for us to get together and do something that we would otherwise do at home. The fact that I can do it here and maybe meet some good people is pretty cool."

Think "hard-core gamer" and chances are you picture a geeky male, ranging in age from 12 to 35. Music games explode that stereotype. Many women who are bored by sports games and the über-violent likes of the Halo series find Guitar Hero and Rock Band utterly engrossing.

Law-Yone has another theory. "I know a lot of my female friends don't like holding a regular controller," she says. "But since this is shaped like a guitar, it doesn't feel so intense, and they can relax and lean back. When I play a game like Halo, I'm like leaning forward, and it's a lot more intense."

In a time when all of the news from the music industry seems to be bad, Guitar Hero and Rock Band have spurred interest in old bands and songs, revitalized the careers of some musicians and refocused a generation of kids on rock and roll. In an era when people seem more and more isolated, alone in front of their screens and walled off from the world by the sounds blasting from their ear buds, these games have brought men and women and young and old together around the gaming console.

But are these games breeding a generation of young musicians? Is there any educational value to these games at all?

Not much, says Ken Arnold, an employee at Houston guitar shop Rockin' Robin. "It's basically a glorified game of Simon," he says, referring to the primitive handheld pattern-matching electronic game from the 1980s. "Everybody that I've talked to that has played has said that it has nothing to do with playing real guitar."