music

What Makes People Want to Play Rock Band and Guitar Hero?

Mike Nobody aerosmith, america, metallica, music, nirvana, pop, rock, technology

What Makes People Want to Play Rock Band and Guitar Hero?
By Gary Marcus
Director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center, and Professor of Psychology at NYU

In some ways, Guitar Hero and Rock Band seem like the stupidest games on earth. Colored discs scroll down a TV screen, and eager participants mash colored buttons in time with what they see. You press a red button when you see a red disc, a blue button when you see a blue disc, and hold your fire when you see nothing. Rinse, lather, and repeat; that’s about all there is to it. Since the sequence and timing are provided by the game software, you don’t really even need to know the songs. There’s no need to strategize ahead (as in chess); no need for big muscles (as in basketball), and no need to bluff past one’s opponent (as in poker). Few games demand less of the player; I suspect monkeys could be trained to play, and know for a fact that robots can cruise through Guitar Hero on Expert.

Yet the two games together have grossed over three billion dollars, and received extensive coverage in highbrow outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly.

What is the appeal of a game that demands so little of the human mind? Part of it of course lies with the music; the latest Rock Band comes complete with Beatles music, and for people like me, who grew up listening to music, no body of music is more compelling. (For people with rather different tastes, there’s Guitar Hero: Metallica and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, with Steely Dan allegedly on its way, although Jimmy Page swears there will never be a Guitar Hero: Led Zeppelin).

Still, at $60, the game costs as much as 4 or 5 albums, and the game takes more work to play. Why mash buttons on a video game controller, when you could put Sgt. Pepper on your CD player, or learn to play a real guitar? If an alien scientist came to observe humanity, they’d find a lot of things puzzling, but few would be as puzzling as Guitar Hero.

* * *
Some games, of course, could be seen as practice for the real world; Monopoly could be viewed as preparation for a career in real estate, chess for the art of war. Many evolutionary psychologists believe that play evolved as way to ease children into their ultimate adult responsibilities; chasing your friends in a game of tag prepares you for the bison hunt on which your life will later depend.

Whether you buy that theory or not, the plastic “guitars” in Guitar Hero have little to do with real guitars; there are no strings, and no frets, there’s no soundhole, and no jack to hook up to an amplifier, either; except for a bit of clattering, the plastic pseudo-instrument makes no sound at all. And there’s no room for genuine creativity, as there would be with a real instrument. A real apprentice guitarist must spend hours and hours practicing scales and chords, and learning about the relation between melody and harmony; an aficionado of Guitar Hero skips straight to the songs, and may well never learn the difference between a major scale and a minor.

Economists would be puzzled, too. It generally costs the same amount or even less (once you factor out the costs of the plastic guitars) to buy the songs on iTunes as to get them in a package for your Xbox, and if you buy them on iTunes, you can play them over and over, wherever you want, in the car, or in the gym, and not just when you stand in front of your television set. You also aren’t stuck suffering through the abominable mid-80’s Hair Metal, in order to “unlock” the next song that you actually like.

What gives? If it’s not practice for a career in music, and it’s not efficient or rational from an economist’s perspective, what is it that drives people to play these games?

* * *
It’s a lust for power.

Not, mind you, of the sort that allows one to rule the world, but the sort that allows one to control one’s own world.

Dozens of studies over the years have shown that human beings are happier when they believe themselves to be in control. In one famous set of studies, participants were asked to solve simple arithmetic problems while sitting in a room in which sudden blasts of noise occurred at random intervals. One group of subjects had no choice but to listen, the others had a panic button they would be allowed to press if the noise became too much. Though few participants actually pressed the button, the mere feeling of control made the entire experience considerably more bearable. In another famous study, dogs were put in an environment in which nothing that they did correlated with their situation; so-called “learned helplessness” — essentially a form of depression — was the result.

Alas, although humans are very fond of being in control, we aren’t always so good at telling whether we actually have it. As Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner has argued in The Illusion of Conscious Will, Oujia boards were designed to trick people into thinking they didn’t have control when they really did. Guitar Hero is designed to do the opposite.

Inferring control is really an exercise in inferring causality; we want to know whether A causes B, but sometimes all we know is that when A happens, B happens too. In technical jargon, we infer causality from temporal contingency.

Games like Guitar Hero set up one of the most potent illusions of temporal contingency I’ve ever seen: if the player presses the button at the right time, the computer plays back a recording of a particular note (or set of notes) played by a professional musician. The music itself is potent and rewarding — Keith Richards really knows how to bend a note — but the real secret to the game is what happens is that fact if you miss the button, you don’t hear the note.

The brain whirs away, and notices the contingency. When I push the button, I hear Keith Richards; when I fail to push the button (or press the wrong button, or press it late), I don’t hear Keith Richards. Therefore, I am Keith Richards!

* * *
It’s not simply that you hear the songs (which bring pleasure) but that the game skillfully induces the illusion that you yourself are generating the songs. You aren’t paying $60 to hear the songs; you’re paying $60 to trick your brain into thinking that you are making them. Your conscious mind may know better — and realize that it’s all just a ruse — but your unconscious mind is completely and happily fooled.

Is that worth $60? If you want to feel like Keith Richards, the answer is surely yes.


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Many Books. Net FREE eBOOKS!

Mike Nobody music

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Run A Free BitTorrent Tracker On Google!

Mike Nobody america, BitTorrent, entertainment, internet, Lawrence Lessig, movies, music, piratebay, web

by Ernesto on September 10, 2009
With both the Pirate Bay and OpenBitTorrent trackers down at the moment, many people are unable to download torrents unless they enable DHT. Luckily there are a few backup trackers that people can use, and thanks to Google’s free App Engine, everyone can setup a tracker of their own in a few minutes.

In their defense, operators of BitTorrent sites often argue that they do nothing more than Google does. They offer a search platform for people to find content on the web, specifically torrent files. To a certain extent they are right, Google can be used to find torrent files in several ways.

For example, the mother of all search engines has a special search command that allows you to find torrent files scattered across the Internet.

Google’s custom search also allows everyone to create their own torrent search engine, and Google’s App Engine enables users to start a free torrent search engine for free by using Google’s servers.

It is quite clear that there are several ways to find torrents through Google. However, just finding torrents is not enough. In order to download content through BitTorrent successfully, one also needs a working tracker in order to locate those all-important peers. Luckily Google can help here too.

By using Google’s App Engine, everyone can run a tracker without having to invest a single dime in hardware or bandwidth. The only problem is making the tracker compatible with the App Engine, but thanks to the newly released Atrack software it is a piece of cake to set one up.

The Atrack Bittorrent tracker is designed to run on Google App Engine and its main goals are a minimal memory use, speed, low bandwidth usage and efficient CPU use. On top of this the tracker wont store any data at all, making it as secure as possible for its users.

“Atrack also aims to respect your privacy: other than what is needed for the most basic tracking, Atrack gathers no information whatsoever. Beyond that no aggregate statistics are kept of anything, and nothing is stored permanently anywhere, not even hashes and ip/ports,” the Atrack team writes.

So now everyone can set up a standalone BitTorrent tracker at no cost aside from the the time it takes to set things up. The Atrack software is released into the public domain, and a test tracker is up and running on Google’s App Engine.


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Mainstream Media: Truth That Sells? – Julian Burnside

Mike Nobody music

Australian barrister Julian Burnside outlines content-related constraints on the media industry. He emphasizes the role of profit as a manipulator of content, claiming sports, sex, and political misconduct as the three most lucrative story topics for media sources.

—–

Newspapers, radio, television and now the internet are the means by which countless millions engage with information about the world in which we live.

For much of the time, the principal purpose of the media is to entertain.

However, there are critical moments in our lives when the truth really matters … when disaster strikes, when powers contend, when the decisions that shape our lives are in the balance.

Can the media be trusted at these moments? Are commercial imperatives overwhelming considerations of public interest that once defined the role of democracys fourth estate? – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Julian Burnside QC, is a barrister, writer and President of Liberty Victoria. He has acted pro bono in many human rights cases and is passionate about the arts. He elaborates the law in relation to art censorship and how it is exercised, including the complexities of “intention,” “context,” “reasonableness,” public attitudes, protecting human rights and freedom of expression.

He is President of Liberty Victoria, Chair of fortyfive downstairs and author of Wordwatching – Fieldnotes from an amateur Philologist and Watching Brief – Reflections on Human Rights, Law and Justice.


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BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Preview: Wendell Potter pt. 1 | PBS

Mike Nobody music

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/071… Meet Wendell Potter. Bill Moyers interviews former health insurance industry executive Wendell Potter, who left the field after almost 20 years to become a health reform advocate. Check out Potters personal story here and tune in to Bill Moyers Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009 at 9PM on PBS (check local listings http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/abo… ) for his experiences inside the health insurance industry, their work fighting a public option, and the insurance companies close ties to Washington. The entire interview will be available after broadcast at http://www.pbs.org/moyers http://www.pbs.org/moyers.


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BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Preview: Wendell Potter pt 2 | PBS

Mike Nobody music

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07102009/profile.htmlHealth … insurance companies vs. Michael Moore. Bill Moyers interviews former health insurance industry executive Wendell Potter, who left the field after almost 20 years to become a health reform advocate. Check out Potters take on the campaign against Michael Moores film Sicko and tune in to Bill Moyers Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009 at 9PM on PBS (check local listings http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/about/airdates.html … for his experiences inside the health insurance industry, their work fighting a public option, and the insurance companies close ties to Washington. The entire interview will be available after broadcast at http://www.pbs.org/moyers


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Failure Builds Character – Mythbusters’ Adam Savage

Mike Nobody music

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/30/MythBuster_Adam_Savages_Colossal_Failures

MythBusters co-host Adam Savage describes the life lesson he learned after a job from his early days as a set designer went horribly awry and ruined a friendship.

—–

The 4th annual Maker Faire Bay Area hosts MythBusters co-host Adam Savage. Savage talks about failure – unmitigated, colossal failures he’s experienced during his career.

Following on President Obama’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America,” Maker Faire 2009 was organized around the theme of Re-Make America. Held in the San Francisco Bay Area, Maker Faire celebrates what President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.”

Adam Savage has spent his life gathering skills that allow him to take what’s in his brain and make it real. He’s built everything from ancient Buddhas to futuristic weapons, from spaceships to dancing vegetables, from fine art sculptures to animated chocolate and just about anything else you can think of.

Since 1993, Adam has concentrated on the special-effects industry, honing his skills through more than 100 television commercials and a dozen feature films, including Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and Episode II: Attack of the Clones, Galaxy Quest, Terminator 3, A.I. and the Matrix sequels. He’s also designed props and sets for Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Lexus and a host of New York and San Francisco theater companies. Not only has he worked and consulted in the research and development division for toy companies and made several short films, but Adam has also acted in several films and commercials — including a Charmin ad, in which he played Mr. Whipple’s stock boy, and a Billy Joel music video, “Second Wind,” in which he drowns.

Today, in addition to co-hosting Discovery Channel’s MythBusters, Adam teaches advanced model making, most recently in the industrial design department at the San Francisco Academy of Art. Somehow he also finds time to devote to his own art. His sculptures have been showcased in over 40 shows in San Francisco, New York and Charleston, W.Va.


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