Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (12 page)

As for the guitar and the bass—well, that’s a more abstract kind of music making. Jesper Juul, a well-known academic researcher of video games, calls it the difference between “playing music,” or actually making the musical sounds, and “performing music,” or doing complex actions that get translated into musical sounds.
¹⁵

Holding down different combinations of button frets
sort of
feels like using different frets to play different chords, and toggling the strum bar back and forth
sort of
feels like strumming the strings. More realistically, you’re playing according to the same rhythms as a real guitarist would, and your fingers
are
moving deftly around the way they might on a real fret board. It’s not playing real music, but it’s performing musical and rhythmic actions in a way that feels closely connected to the actual song.

On all the instruments, the more accurately you hit your notes, the better and fuller the backing song tracks sound. If you’re messing up on drums, the drum track disappears from the song. If you’re hitting only half your guitar notes, the guitar track sounds spotty. But if the entire band is playing successfully, the song is virtually identical to the original artist’s track.

Alex Rigopulos, one of the creators of the
Rock Band
series, has said that one of the goals of the game is for “the music to come alive when you’re playing.”
¹⁶
And that’s the best way to describe the sensation of playing the game. Although you’re not really “playing” the music, you
are
making the music come to life. You can really hear the impact of your efforts in the song that’s produced—and hopefully you’re making it sound better. The more complicated your finger work or rhythm work, or the more demanding the pitch detector is of you, the more real the connection between your work and how the song feels.

Every step up the difficulty chart gives you a more complicated set of musical actions to perform. And each added layer of complexity feels more closely connected to the real musical work of the song: more complex chords or deftly syncopated drumbeats or pitch perfection.

For all of these reasons, getting better at
Rock Band
feels like a truly worthy goal. You are mastering your favorite songs in a way that will let you connect and interact with them,
and
potentially perform them in front of an audience. This is perhaps the game’s biggest secret to cultivating the hope of success: the
Rock Band
gaming culture extends many, many opportunities to perform in front of audiences. You can perform in front of friends and family in your own home. You can go to bars in just about every major city to participate in
Rock Band
game nights and perform on a real stage. And
Rock Band
is also one of the most popular choices for live video game tournaments these days.

The possibility of not only mastering a song, but also showing off that mastery to others, amplifies the optimistic drive. And fortunately for players who want to really master the hard and extreme versions of their favorite songs, failure in
Rock Band
is about as entertaining and energizing as failure can get.

The fun of
Rock Band
failure starts with the audio effects. If you get behind the beat or off your pitch or hit too many wrong notes, the song audibly starts to fall apart. First you hear bad notes in the musical accompaniment. Then you hear heckles and boos from the crowd. The more you fail, the more the song falls apart. Eventually, if you’re bad enough, the visual effects kick in: you’ll be booed off the stage by the animated crowd while your avatar pouts and skulks around the stage and all the band members shake their fists and scowl at each other. It’s a highly entertaining fail sequence—so over-the-top that you can’t help but laugh at yourself.

Even better, the “fail sequence” in real life is often more entertaining than the online version. When your performance power bar hits the red zone, indicating that you are about to be booed offstage, you can’t help yourself: you give it one last shot, whaling away at your instrument the best you can. You fling the drumsticks around like crazy, or strain your vocal chords to the farthest extremes of your range, or mash the plastic guitar frets and thrash your strum button like a maniac. That last desperate rush of play is energizing even if you’re playing alone—but when you’re playing with at least one other person, it’s also hysterically funny.

Combined with the positive emotions that this kind of spectacular failure sparks, you also get a bit of crucial information every time you wipe out on a song: an exact percentage readout of how far in the song you got before being booed off the stage. This information shows you what you’ve positively accomplished—even if it’s only 33 percent, you’ve survived a third of the way through the song. You haven’t so much failed as achieved partial success. And the higher your percentage gets, the more capable and confident you feel—and the desire for one more go at the song kicks in.

This desire isn’t misdirected: the game environment supports your hope of success in several key ways. For instance, each player in your band can select a different difficulty level, meaning your experienced drummer can play on hard while your vocalist scrapes by on medium and your beginner guitarist takes it easy. This allows each player to set his or her own customized and realistic goal, while still playing the same song with the group.

If you’re playing with friends, you can also “save” each other from musical disaster. If the bassist wipes out, the guitarist can play a spectacular solo and revive her. If the drummer fails, the singer can belt the chorus perfectly to bring him back into the game. You can actually fail and be revived by other band members twice before you get booed off for good. And, crucially, saves are dependent on the successful effort of another band member. One member’s failure pushes the others to do better.

The real-time feedback from the game also makes it easy to learn from your mistakes. When you’re playing the drum or string instruments, you get visual confirmation of every note you hit or miss. You know instantly that you’re off the beat or getting your chords wrong, and it’s easy to identify exactly where you’re getting tripped up. When you’re the singer, you can watch the musical staff to see if you’re perfectly on pitch, sharp, or flat. You can adjust in real time, sliding up or down to hit the right note—and after a few goes at the same song, you actually start to sound better.

All of these features make
Rock Band
feel like a learning environment. And playing really does seem to help us grow musically, even if it’s just a better understanding of the rhythms and tracks of songs we’ve always loved, or a greater confidence performing in front of friends and family.

Moreover, research suggests that players of music video games are increasingly driven to play
real
musical instruments. In a 2008 study of more than seven thousand
Rock Band
and
Guitar Hero
players
,
67 percent of the non-musicians in the group reported that they had been inspired to pick up a real instrument since they’d started playing the video games. Meanwhile, 72 percent of the gamers who considered themselves musicians reported that they’d spent more time playing their real instruments since beginning to play music video games.
¹⁷

No major research has been published yet on whether games like
Rock Band
confer real musical ability. But these games are without a doubt conferring real optimism, which in turn inspires real musical participation.

 

 

YOU CAN PLAY
Rock Band
alone—practicing any of the four instruments by yourself—but gamer surveys indicate that hardly anyone does. In fact, a 2008 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project looked at the role of video games in family life and explicitly credited music video games like
Rock Band
for increasing the amount of time gamers of all ages spend playing together.

It’s no coincidence that one of the most optimism-building video games is also one of the most social. One of the biggest hopes we have for our own success is to share it. We want others to see our strengths, and to reflect our achievements back to us. Success, as they say, means nothing alone. For all the positive feedback that a game can give us, we crave the praise and admiration of our friends and family even more.

In fact, studies have shown that optimism makes us more likely to seek out social support and develop strong relationships.
¹⁸
When we feel a strong sense of agency and motivation, we draw other people closer into our lives. And that’s why so much of the fun failure we experience in games is increasingly taking place in a social context. More and more, we are inviting our friends and family to play with us, whether it’s in person or online. We seek out opportunities to perform our favorite games in front of audiences. And we form long-term teams, like our
World of Warcraft
guilds and our rock bands.

It may have once been true that computer games encouraged us to interact more with machines than with each other. But if you still think of gamers as loners, then you’re not playing games.

M
ore than 5 million people are playing the online word game Lexulous on Facebook. And most of them are playing it with their moms.

When the game was released in 2007, it became the first Facebook application to achieve a mass audience, and the familiarity of the gameplay was one of its main attractions. If you know how to play Scrabble, then you already know how to play Lexulous
—
it’s just a slightly modified and unauthorized version of the classic board game, combined with online chat.
¹
There’s no time limit on turns, and games stay active even when you log out of the social network. Whenever it’s your turn, Facebook sends you an alert to your home page, your e-mail, or your mobile phone.

Here’s how one Lexulous reviewer sums up its cross-generational appeal: “Everyone in your social network, even your mom, knows how to play Scrabble.”
²
No doubt that’s why so many of the online rave reviews include the phrase “my mom”—like this one: “I live in Atlanta, and my mom’s in Texas. We love to have game night across the miles. Although I am sure she needs a break from me kicking her butt all of the time. (Love you, Mom!)”
³

I’ve been reading game reviews for most of my life and I’ve never seen anything close to this many mom references. In fact, it’s not that much of a stretch to say that, for many, the primary reason they play
Lexulous
is to have an excuse to talk to their mom every day.

It’s not just online reviews that have given me this suspicion—there’s photographic evidence as well. Lexulous games are private, but players often post screenshots of their most triumphant moments on photo-sharing sites like Flickr and Photobucket. In these screenshots, which usually have titles like “Online Scrabble with Mom” or “In Which I Beat My Mother at Lexulous,” you get a glimpse of the kind of everyday familial checking-in that runs alongside the wordplay.
⁴
Much of the chat is mundane game talk, but you also see a constant stream of catching up, like these messages spied on Flickr: “Have you started your internship yet? How is that going?”
⁵
and “Knee still hurt. Putting a lot of ice on it.”
⁶
Or “What are you doing after work?” and “Your stepfather says hello.”
⁷
Some chat messages simply express users’ happiness to be playing together, like this one from a mom to two daughters: “Glad to see you two, even if you do spank me when we play. :)”
⁸
Of course, there are tons of messages that simply say: “I love you.”
⁹

Judging from the shared screenshots, it’s not
just
moms whom players use Lexulous to keep in touch with daily. There are also plenty of running games against dads, cousins, siblings, in-laws, former coworkers, faraway friends, and spouses on business trips. (That’s when I most frequently play Lexulous—I keep a game running against my husband when I’m traveling for work. It helps me feel like we’re actually doing something together, not just checking in.)

Because you don’t have to be online playing at the same time, it’s easy to organize a game with anyone else, no matter where or how busy they are. You can easily keep up with the game by playing literally only a few minutes a day. And by keeping running games going with your real-life friends and family, you’re ensuring daily opportunities to actively connect with the people you care about most.

The tight-knit nature of the Lexulous game world wasn’t a necessary outcome of the game’s design. On Facebook, you can technically start a Lexulous game with anyone—even people you don’t know—but most people play against people they already count as Facebook “friends.” Playing Lexulous is checking in with our loved ones, but with a purpose. For anyone who has ever needed a gentle reminder to stay in touch, Lexulous provides a motivation. It helps us stay actively connected, by reminding us that it’s literally “our turn” to say something. And when there’s a game on the line, suddenly staying in touch is not just pleasant and gratifying—it is also addictive.

The secret to the addictiveness of Lexulous is its
asynchronous
gameplay: players don’t have to be online at the same time, and can take their turns whenever they want. Some Lexulous games go quickly, with players trading words every few minutes, but many games go quite slowly, with players taking just one or two turns a day, or even less often than that.

The unpredictable rhythm of asynchronous play adds a measure of anticipation. You’re thinking about your next play, but you don’t know when you’ll be able to make it. You’re motivated to act, but you have to wait for your Facebook friends to check back into the game. And because you often have no idea if your friends are still logged on or paying attention to the game, there’s an emotional buildup to waiting for their next moves. As one player puts it, “You have to be addicted AND patient.”
¹⁰