Video games more social, cool

I think I’m a little bit addicted to “Guitar Hero.”

For the uninitiated, “Guitar Hero” is… I think I’m a little bit addicted to “Guitar Hero.”

For the uninitiated, “Guitar Hero” is a video game where you play along to the guitar parts of lots of different famous rock songs.

You have a controller, shaped more or less like a guitar that has five colored buttons on the neck, and a “strum bar” that you have to hit to strum and that’s pretty much how you play. And it’s awesome.

I don’t say this lightly because I’m a big game player. But “Guitar Hero” isn’t just a regular video game where you sit in front of the TV like a fish and mash buttons to do whatever it is you want to do. Instead, it requires a good deal of skill and coordination. It’s not a game that you become skilled at overnight, in other words. What guitar hero does best, and is becoming the goal of other games, is changing video games from a solitary, ‘nerdy’ activity to a form of socializing with other people.

Think about it: how many video games today include some sort of multiplayer option or online play? I’d be willing to say nearly all of them, and almost all the best-selling games of the past several years have had some form of multiplayer ability.

Games like “Guitar Hero” take this aspect to another level because instead of making the game about strategy or in-game knowledge, it provides one of the most stripped-down and simplistic experiences you can have. And, to reiterate, it’s awesome. So instead of cutting a bunch of non-gamers out of the loop with steep learning curves and weird game mechanics, it’s inherently inclusive.

But “Guitar Hero” isn’t the only example of the increasingly social games of today.

There’s another, perhaps even bigger, phenomenon that’s swept the video game world in the last year: the Wii. Nintendo realized that instead of super-advanced graphics and amazing realism, what people really want from their entertainment is just that: entertainment.

People, believe it or not, want to have fun when they’re trying to have fun. Sure, dazzling graphics and FMV sequences and hyper-realistic physics are cool and all, but they don’t make a game. So instead of concentrating on all that stuff, Nintendo did something different and concentrated on the interface. And now my mom will sit around playing golf on the Wii and humming along to songs she knows on Guitar Hero.

Of course, these aren’t the only examples. For instance, look at Halo, which has pretty much built its success on the popularity of its multiplayer mode and took Xbox Live from an annoying fringe service to one of the best things about having an Xbox. And I shouldn’t even have to mention the huge number of tournaments and competitions growing up around video games these days.

The other thing that’s great about video games moving from a nerdy outcast activity to a mainstream form of entertainment is it gives developers and players more room to experiment with what they want to do. Take “Rock Band,” the next follow-up to “Guitar Hero,” as an example.

The people making this game have taken the engine that made the originals such a success, with the notes scrolling at you as you play them, and applied it to the whole scope of a band: guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.

The whole point of this game is to get three or four people together and play a video game just like you’d play in a real band, only with the added benefit of not needing any real musical talent.

However, this increased socialization does beg the question of whether or not video games are the same thing that they used to be. Previously, there’d be a couple groups of people at every high school and college that would hang out and play video games while the other “cool” kids were out at parties or playing football or whatever.

But now that video games are reaching an increasingly broad and more mainstream audience, is it really right to still perceive them as being an “uncool” activity? I think that we should think of video games in the same way that we think of movies and television, because they’ve really become just as mainstream as any other form of entertainment.

Sure, you’ll still have the occasional oddball who claims they melt brains or make kids go crazy, but they said the same thing about rock music and slasher films. Video games are the new “cool,” and increasingly they’re the new social gathering point as well.

But enough about all this. I’ve got to go play some more Guitar Hero.

E-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu if you rock out to fake guitar as well.