First off, if you haven’t played Rock Band, play it, and if you don’t have it, get it. It may be the best party game ever made (rivaling Death Tank Zwei for the honor, anyway). And I’m not just saying that because we have two people here at Conduit who worked on it. If you like music (and that’s pretty much everyone, right?), then you will have fun. It’s so much fun we held off on setting it up in the office until we had finished launching a little Facebook toy we built called Make Me, knowing it would be impossible not to play once it was here.
My younger brother once told me that Sorry! is one of his favorite games, because inevitably, after a game, the players would hate each other for hours. Sometimes days. I mean, how powerful is that? A bunch of silly rules and plastic pieces moving into our lives, evoking real, outside-of-the-game emotions and putting strains on real-world relationships.
Rock Band is that kind of powerful. This story at the Escapist captures what a good game can do perfectly:
“This is not the revolution; it’s just something like it. It’s not about games. It’s about music. It’s a new way of listening, of trying to get in, like following the lyrics in the album sleeve or clumsily learning the chords on a beat-up guitar in the hopes of one day being that guy at a party who impresses the girls who might like the song as much as you do.”
If you can take the time, read through the whole story and count how many times actual gameplay is mentioned—hardly any! It’s about relationships that form through gameplay. Like just a couple weeks ago I was playing Rock Band with some friends; my friend Misty is our bass player. We get to a song with a particularly tricky bass line, and
she fails and we lose it. Stacie takes over for her, and manages to get through it.
“I don’t want to play anymore,” Misty says. “You guys seem to be doing FINE with Stacie on bass.” I sit down on the couch next to her. “Misty, listen to me. Boys Boning Boys is not Boys Boning Boys without you on bass. We need you.”
Misty looks up with these puppy dog eyes, “Really?”.
Needless to say, Misty came back and played, and we rocked. This was one of the most awesomely surreal and hilarious experiences of my life. I love it… and it’s what Rock Band is all about.
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hell yeh!!! i AM the bassist!!! haha and that IS what rock band is all about. it’s really the ONLY game i can get completely into. in fact – i’m a nanny and one of the kids i nanny got rock band for his bday and we play it together all the time…he’s 13 and he knows i’m cool now haha! and though our band doesnt carry the glorious name ‘boys boning boys’ – it is indeed some fine rock band being played.
and for the record – i didnt entirely fail the game on my own…it was all the jack that did it hahahahah. and i did come back, as always – with a freaking vengeance because i AM the freaking bassist!!! BAM!
“I mean, how powerful is that? A bunch of silly rules and plastic pieces moving into our lives, evoking real, outside-of-the-game emotions and putting strains on real-world relationships.”
I used to play WoW and I can say that this holds true on the internet as well. There can be an amazing sense of accomplishment for achieving a goal such as killing the biggest baddest guy in town – which leads to cheering and virtual ‘high-fives’, and sometimes even DANCING!
On the flip side look at some of the YouTube videos of people screaming and crying because they got killed by another player. WoW is an example of people who tend to enjoy just looking at their pretty avatar and using the same dance emote/graphic for hours while chatting to friends or trolling the local chat channel. Some people even try to dress up in particularly elaborate getups and enjoy the attention of knowing that to some other person – they look cool.
This is why I foresee this project working out quite well. The main challenge in my opinion is going to be getting the community basis together, because without hundreds or thousands of random people to impress, there is nothing to achieve.