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.