“The actual experience of playing Guitar Hero is nothing like playing a real guitar,” says Andrew Clarke, “and it’s because you’re basically just following instructions. You’re just following along with something that has already been written. You’re just concentrating on an on and off switch, hitting the right notes at the right time. That’s not actually playing music. What it actually is the most like, and what makes it great, is listening to music.”

Guitar Hero is a loud cultural phenomenon. The game, originally created by developers Harmonix, has become a ravenous beast that has scoured across the music, gaming, and even television world. After selling millions Harmonix moved on from what was becoming a repetitive series of games and instead created Rock Band. Rock Band — a similar game to Guitar Hero in gameplay — moved from only using one guitar to including drum and microphone peripherals as well. With Guitar Hero on its fourth iteration and Rock Band on its second, the music genre they have created will only continue to get bigger and bigger.

I was never a fan of either franchises. What people made out to be some sort of social experience of musical transcendence instead looked like a bunch of saggy pale faced gamers hopping up and down and slamming on a tiny plastic guitar. Most often they played the game to nu-metal howlings, like Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness”, a song that had more in common with a hangover than actual music. I heard fun and love of music. I saw karaoke for introverted geeks and songs for “wacky” teenage girls who dye their hair green. I saw these people.

But I am a serious games journalist with a serious games blog. Called Rabbit Robot.

So for the sake of being serious and understanding why people loved these games so much, and to understand why it’s so different from the reality of guitar playing, I felt the need to do an act of investigative journalism. I started by having a discussion with Andrew Clarke, a 32-year-old musician and songwriter based in London. Talking with Clarke for almost two hours yielded a lot of interesting answers (and questions). For starters, he had a lot to say about why playing Guitar Hero is not at all like playing music, and why that’s not necessarily a negative.

Says Clarke: “What the physical action allows you to do is to pay attention to every tiny little bit of the song. If you have a complicated solo or something, suddenly the notes are more dense and you’re sweating and leaning closer to the screen and your fingers are tense. It simulates the effect of getting excited by a big crescendo of the music. It gives you a physical and visceral counterpoint to the song. Your whole body, your whole organism is getting into it.”

When I mention it sounds a lot like dancing, Clarke pauses for a moment and agrees. “That would probably be the best metaphor for it. Since you’re getting your whole body into the experience.”

Andrew Clarke has a good idea of the different experiences guitar playing can evoke. Since the age of sixteen he’s been playing the guitar, and for the most part taught himself how to play the instrument. Before that his music experience was limited, with himself not even listening to music on any regular basis until he was about fourteen. Still, it was his self-teaching methods that were so bizarre. “I didn’t get a book, I didn’t get lessons, I just f***ed around until I heard something good.”

After that Clarke eventually started learning a tad more traditionally, with someone in college actually teaching him how to play Nirvana’s “It Smells Like Teen Spirit”. It opened Clarke’s eyes to how simple playing rock songs on guitar was, as he had always assumed all guitar playing was as complicated and furious as jazz guitar. Eventually, Clarke had learned a lot of what he calls “the tricks” of guitar playing and by the time he was eighteen he was playing live. Since then Andrew has written quite a few songs and has played plenty on stage. His music has a distinct folk flavor to it, and at the same time pulls threads from other genres like blues, creating a thoughtful, comfortable, and sometimes rousing listening experience. There’s story in his verses, and it’s something we further discuss when we look into the act of playing Bob Dylan in Rock Band 2.

With a good amount of experience behind him I knew talking to Andrew would yield plenty of noteworthy material about the act of really playing guitar, so before I sat down with the London guitarist I decided I needed to understand these music games more. Even though Clarke had a little bit of familiarity with Guitar Hero, stating his experience playing it “wasn’t that bad”, I still wanted a strong understanding of these games in our discussion. It seemed I would have to buy Rock Band 2 myself, and dive deep into this relatively new genre. A genre, that before I even touched it, I more or less hated.

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