In recent interviews, Dhani Harrison, son of Beatle George Harrison, has not only revealed the existence of Rock Band 3, he's also dropped a tantalizing detail about the gameplay. According to Harrison, Rock Band 3 will teach gamers how to play music "for real" as they go.
“I’m working on Rock Band 3 and making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game,” Harrison said. “Give me a couple years, it’s going to happen.”
Any stories about music games that originate from rock-personas have to be taken with skepticism -- musicians have often dropped wrong information about the video games they're working on because they're way too busy making music and/or pulling groupies to worry about the finer points of video games -- but Harrison is different. By all accounts, he was a major figure behind the scenes of The Beatles: Rock Band, and seems to know his stuff. So when Harrison talks, you have to listen.
My question is: Do gamers want to learn to play music? As a (mediocre) guitar player, lemme tell you: Playing real music is nearly infinitely more difficult than playing video game music. It's not fun to learn to play an instrument in the same way it's fun to learn a game (It's much more rewarding when it actually "works," though,) and I, for one, have no desire to mix these two things.
Currently, other than the vocals, no part of Guitar Hero or Rock Band actually improves your real musicianship very much. You can gain rudimentary rhythmic improvement from drum playing, and maybe a touch of limb-independence front the guitar and the drums, but nothing too serious. I could see it working as an optional "learning mode," but not as a core gameplay mechanic. For a more in-depth look at using Rock Band to play "real" drums from an actual musician, please enjoy this video:
What do you think? Do you want to use a game to learn to play real guitar, bass or drums better?
Source: Chicago Tribune
