Hey, Lussy here.
This month has been much of the same, so we don't really have a lot to say about work-related stuff. We're still working on the Oregon Trail project, although it has changed considerably and the gameplay is somewhat different now. We'll talk more about it as soon as there is something new to show.
In other news, we've wanted to talk about Rocksmith.
I've been "playing", or rather using this software for half a year now. For more than a decade I've tried to learn bass – I've had the guitar but never had enough motivation to just sit down and do it. By disguising learning as a rhythm game, Rocksmith succeeded in getting me to spend at least one hour every day practicing songs.
The software itself, aside from the brilliant concept, is nothing special – in fact, it's rather cumbersome to use. We suspect that this is because of the engine it was built in (Gamebryo why?), but we're not sure. In any case, there are times when the UI is unresponsive and there are times when the sound glitches out. Sound is pretty important in a software like this, and the most annoying thing is the slight bit of latency that throws off my accuracy no matter how hard I try to stay in sync with the backing track. It also frequently misregisters notes. And that's not even mentioning the time when it froze the whole operating system, forcing us to cut the power to the computer, which then refused to recognize the hard drive until we reset it a few more times.
However, I am a big fan of the way the charts are made. Coming in after playing just about every rhythm game imaginable, the charts read intuitively, and after a few months, I could find the notes on the fretboard without having to look down at all.
As a learning tool, it reached its primary goal – I learned from it. The cable it comes bundled with (that we bought separately) is high quality and works well, so after I got tired of the latency issue and the somewhat weird sound mixing of the software, I could plug the guitar directly into my Macbook (which has no line in port, so I've had no way of doing this before) and use it with GarageBand's virtual amps. It has no latency (or at least very minimal, compared to Rocksmith) that way, and also sounds way better.
And since the game had created a habit of sitting down after work and at least playing a few songs, if not even learning anything new or working on new techniques, I continued this habit and paired it with looking up information manually and learning songs either by ear or from tabs.
I've read a lot of negative opinions about Rocksmith, because it's 'not really playing guitar' or 'not teaching enough' or 'not teaching things in the proper order', but while I agree with some of these – it really doesn't give enough information or proper feedback –, for some people (e.g., me), beginning something with proper lessons ruins the fun of playing around and figuring things out.
The same thing happened to me with drawing: as soon as I went to school, I was bombarded with rules on how to properly draw and what not to ever do if I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. And most of these rules are there for a reason, but if a student is forbidden from ever making these mistakes, they won't really learn why they shouldn't do them, they will only have a mental checklist of things to avoid, just because.
I could have been told in the beginning, for example, that deathgripping the neck was bad, but then I would never have stressed my hands out so much that they hurt for 3 days straight. I'm not saying it was good that they hurt, but now I can differentiate between good and bad pain instead of just taking someone's word for it, and I definitely won't make a habit of it since I know exactly what it leads to. But I guess the learning process just works differently for different kinds of people.
Wow, this turned into a really long ramble.
I guess the bottom line is, Rocksmith is a perfect example of a good idea with less-than-polished execution. It's far from being a good rhythm game, but it's a good way of starting to learn guitar or bass.
