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Harmonix co-founder answers RocK Band questions, discusses Rock Band and the music industry
A portion of a New York Times Q&A with Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix…
Q: Freakonomics questioned whether your games might have actually helped to revive the music industry. At the same time, do you think they’re discouraging kids from picking up real instruments? If you really wanted to encode the essence of music into software, shouldn’t this be done in a way that people can actually learn a viable skill that will help them produce music?
AR: First of all, in Rock Band the singing gameplay is really singing, and the game feedback on the singer’s pitch really does help people become better singers. And while the drumming gameplay isn’t an exact replication of real drumming, it’s certainly a sufficiently close simulation that players develop skills which they can directly apply to real drumming. I am continually seeing people migrate from Rock Band onto real drums naturally.
The guitar controller and gameplay are, of course, a far more abstracted version of the real thing. There are some rudimentary musical skills you’re learning through the gameplay, such as a better sense of rhythm, and you’re learning the basic dexterity of rhythmic input through one hand and pitch selection with the other. But it’s not like an expert Rock Band guitarist can just pick up a guitar and start playing.
That said, there’s still value. We don’t see Rock Band as an educational tool for guitar so much as an inspirational tool. Most people who try to learn guitar quit soon after, because their initial experience is just frustratingly difficult. By giving people a taste of what lies on the other side, we’re inspiring them to invest themselves in learning the instrument for real. The game isn’t a substitute, it’s a stimulus. I’ve had many guitar instructors now tell me that their business has heated up over the past couple of years, and most of their new students got motivated by their experience playing Rock Band or Guitar Hero.