Why I hate Guitar Hero

I started out to just make a top ten list of reasons I hate Guitar Hero. However, a mere bulleted list wasn't nearly adequate for holding all the hostility I've collected in the past few months. Hence, the diatribe. Enjoy.

My generation is the video game generation. I've long since come to terms with that. Since I was a child, I have gone from playing Atari to flailing wildly about at zombies on the Wii in my so-called adulthood.

Now, many females enjoy video games, but we don't seem to be as obsessed with them as our male counterparts. Personally speaking, I lost interest sometime during the "Quake 2" phenomenon in university. Perhaps I outgrew it; perhaps I stopped because I no longer lived in a home with electricity or owned a TV. Whatever the reason, it's been about eight years since I was in the loop. Most of my female friends are the same.

In 2007, I had the opportunity to travel around and visit long lost friends I haven't seen since my university days. Unlike me, they got useful degrees, real jobs, and have bright career paths. Before arriving in Toronto in October, I was anticipating some intellectual conversation. Working in a small BC resort town, one doesn't often hear conversation outside the topics of snow, skiing, logging, and the railway.

Instead of intellectual intercourse, I got Guitar Hero.

What smart folks my age do, when they are not working, is sit at home and play Guitar Hero. When socializing is in order, they take their fake plastic guitars to their friends' places and everyone takes turns playing Guitar Hero, while others watch. Then they videotape it, put it on You Tube, and watch You Tube videos of other people playing Guitar Hero. Even my most reliably intelligent friend was playing the damn game when I arrived for the evening.

This can't be everyone, I thought. Maybe it's just a disease geeky urbanite Torontonians are spreading around.

Flash forward to Vancouver in December. I meet with two long-lost girlfriends one evening, and the subject of the game never arises. The next night, I am invited to attend a wine and cheese party with a male friend. Ahhh, wine and cheese. Booze and food, intellectual conversation. I didn't really know anyone, but who cares? There will be wine!

We walk in the door, and are given a glass of wine. In the living room, two tables are covered in delicious, expensive, exotic cheese. My wine is delicious, and definitely cost more than ten dollars a bottle. Approaching thirty, this type of party seems more along the lines of what I was expecting, the sing-along to bad Bon Jovi songs notwithstanding.

Until the next set of guests arrived, plastic guitars in their little snazzy cases. Out comes the game, on goes the TV. Guitar Hero reigned for the rest of the evening.

New Years in New Brunswick? Guitar Hero. In Toronto in January, I saw people walking around downtown carrying the silly plastic guitars. It's utterly ridiculous. I never walked around toting my Duck Hunt gun in a holster.

Now, I don't mind video games, I love music, and I love playing the guitar. I love discussing music, jamming about, talking nerdy, talking politics, throwing paper airplanes, puddle jumping, making snowpeople, and many other random things. My friends do as well. I've tried playing the game, and it isn't bad, all things considered. However, the frenzy that has gripped my friends is rather disturbing.

As generations go, ours is already seriously deprived of social skills. Email, ICQ, MSN, Blackberrys, and text messages have us speaking different languages. Telephones are bad enough, but face to face communication? How scary! I've watched people send each other text messages from different ends of the couch. Okay, it was actually me.

Any time I gather with my friends in the same room, it's a miracle we can even look at each other. I don't need that time zapped by another technological craze. Getting a date is hard enough already.

I'm a musician, so I could rant and rave about how this game is not anything like playing a real guitar, how it creates arrogant assholes who don't know a thing about how hard it actually is to play those songs. Not to mention all the annoying air guitar playing that goes on or how I get tired hearing the same songs repeated endlessly as someone perfects their score. Many of my friends don't even like most of the bands whom they are emulating! Insanity.

I won't, though. The real reason I despise this game is because I have better things to do, and I want to do them with my friends. That's all.

So take your wrist off the whammy bar, remove the plastic appendage, and look at me, sitting here, waiting to communicate. Actually, I'm waiting for the best possible moment to crack a joke about your mom I've been saving for weeks.