Sometimes you like to pat yourself on the back for having a fun idea like "Guitar Hero? What about Techno Hero!!!! That would be so much fun, like haha stupid what would you do, sit there and push play.....haha stupid idea."
Then someone from Japan blows your fucking brain away.
That person (female, I think, because of the spotty nail polish) is playing beatmania IIDX 15 DJ:Troopers. As you might be able to tell from all the postfixes, it's the latest in a very long run of titles Konami's Bemani series. It's included games like Guitar Freaks, that featured a guitar controller way before Guitar Hero came out, portable (!) rhythm games called Bemani Pocket, and most famously, Dance Dance Revolution. The IIDX iteration, which has been around since 1999, features two one-octave keyboard pads and a turntable controller (yes, she's using it in the video - check the pinky). Instead of a meager 50-someodd songs like Guitar Hero and Rock Band come with, they have...500 songs. Blam!
In December, there was a gigantic "Bemani 10th anniversary Memorial Event" concert in Tokyo called Gitado Live:
How in the goddamn fucking hell had I not heard of this entire world before this morning? It got me thinking. Right now, video gaming - in the United States, at least - is a world of extremes.
At one end you have your nephews and second cousins that are Halo freaks, forget to do their homework, and generally stay away from drugs aside from score-enhancing Adderall. They look up to professional gamers like Fatal1ty and are either afraid of other people or only associate with others online or in real life who share their level of dedication. Sometimes they grow out of it, sometimes they don't. In Japan they call that level of dedication Otaku, and it occupies a much larger segment of the national imagination there than it does here.
On the other end, you have your grandmother. Maybe you'd really love to show her Wii Tennis one day, but otherwise she's not someone you'd want to get into it with.
As an aging post-hardcore (!!!) gamer myself, I was getting very discouraged with my gaming level. I felt out of place. I'm pretty good at Rock Band and could pull off a couple of combos in Street Fighter II Turbo back in the day and generally pwn at arcades circa 1996, and could certainly kick most of your asses in Wii Tennis today. But once I get online, any notions I might have had about being in the upper 50th percentile of the gaming public fades disparagingly quickly. I try to form pickup Rock Bands with strangers in other parts of the country and find myself getting kicked out of the band before you even start because my Xbox Live Gamerscore isn't four digits long.
That's why I was very excited to read about a newly defined (I think) and hopefully expanding class of humans: midcore gamers. There's a definition of what one is, but I think this is a class of people who will only to be able to identify themselves once they're in it. If you're sub-midcore, you're a n00b. If you're more than midcore, you're Otaku. Perhaps the most important thing about midcore for me is that it allows one to be comfortable with who they really are: an enlightened observer. They can extract giddy pleasure from watching n00bs wrap their smooth palms around a Wiimote for the first time, and have visions of them one day joining the midcore ranks. Perhaps more importantly, though, they can look at Otaku with a sense of incalculable awe mixed with projected embarrassment. Midcore gamers can comfortably spend 10 - 15 hours a week practicing solos in Rock Band (ok, maybe 24 or 48 hours if things are slow at work), but you'll never find them having to choose between their consoles and their lovers. Or their consoles and their apartment. Or their consoles and their dinner.
Although people like me will never be able to break news the way sites like Joystiq and Kotaku already do, they might be able to form a new style of journalism - the USA Today, Time Magazine segment of video game coverage, sprinkled with a bit of long tail ethos - that looks at everyone's involvement in the gaming community with equal zeal, no matter what their Gamerscore is. It might even be important! When games become the most important form of communication in our culture, there will be widely varying levels of involvement with the medium. Someone's got to sit in the middle and call the shots, right? Midcore FTW!
"Gabe" of Penny Arcade wrote an interesting blog post (see last paragraph) about the hardcore/casual gamer divide that I think relates to what you're talking about. Not everyone who likes video games gets all their enjoyment from grinding, obsessive drilling against impossible challenges (not that there's anything wrong with that). There's also a social/artistic side to it that doesn't get enough mainstream attention.
Posted by: sinisterscrawl | February 06, 2008 at 07:27 PM
It's nice to see posts about video games on here. I really think they are more important and pervasive than they get credit for in this country. By the way, Beatmania came out for PS2 here, an earlier version of the game...it's really hard, and it didn't sell well so you can find it pretty cheap. I think I got mine new with the keyboard for less than $30.
Posted by: Warg | February 06, 2008 at 08:16 PM
Virtual Reality is like mainlining television. -William Gibson
Guitar Hero? Rock Band? I don't get it.
Spent several hours a day in High School playing video games (the relatively lame ones for the Commodore 64, mind you, not even the immersive experiences of contemporary games) instead of learning guitar. I'll be 40 in a couple of years, wondering all the while why I didn't get chops then. Picked up my '92 Squier "Wayne's World" Strat for the first time in many years over the summer; I'm hesitant to put it down now.
Truly strange: Xbox 360 Core + Rock Band sans nifty game controllers: $340 plus tax. Squier "Stop Dreaming, Start Playing" kit, complete with student Stratocaster and transistor amp: $300 plus tax.
I'm perplexed by people's willingness to continue to live as spectators rather than as participants.
You can't get the time back, comrades. Carpe diem.
Posted by: Mickey Mephistopheles | February 07, 2008 at 12:21 AM
@Sinistercrawl: Thanks for pointing that post out. That's exactly what I find most interesting about gaming - the social / artistic side that evades so many people who are on either side of the spectrum, and why I have so much hope for the (hopefully) upcoming expansion of the midcore sector.
@Warg: Thanks, I found the domestic Beatmania on eBay a few minutes after I posted this and if all goes well it'll be on its way to me with a DJ controller for $15 in a few days.
@MM: Ahh, I spent some time on a C64 in my early youth too. It was mostly with LOGO and the Roger Rabbit video game, I was scared shitless of the evil doctor, forgot his name.
Your point of view certainly makes sense at a very superficial level, and Gibson's makes sense on fewer and fewer levels as virtual reality becomes what it's actually become, not what it was when he wrote that. Playing Rock Band can be about a lot of things, as Gabe pointed out in the Penny Arcade post sinistercrawl mentioned above. But it is never, ever, ever about actually BEING in a Rock Band. It's enhanced karaoke, extremely enhanced karaoke and I don't think anyone thinks it's not, except for Otaku. And even then, even those hardest of core gamers probably see the irony in practicing on a plastic guitar surrogate for 10 hours a day.
Rock Band, for me, is about having a unified moment. Chuck Klosterman (growl all you want) and I'm sure a lot of others wrote at one point about how our diversified media landscape will lead to fewer and fewer "universal moments" for people growing up now. While my half-sister who's 20 years older than me may have a handful of 5 or 10 songs that really embody her experience as a teenager, I have a basket full of about 50 or 60. Kids growing up now will probably have hundreds once they're older.
The 50 some-odd songs that are in Rock Band really click with me and my roommates. We can all sit around for hours on end and have a fun time together every night and not get distracted - our efforts are truly concentrated on having a good time together. And the conduit isn't beer or sex or drugs or anything - it's playing Rock Band. So it's not about being a spectator. You don't sit and watch other people play Rock Band and NOT want to play. Watching people play Rock Band makes you want to participate.
(Also - a small but important detail about Rock Band - a couple of the interstitial "fun facts" screens that appear while songs are loading up say things like "A real guitar isn't that cheap. Maybe it's time to invest.")
Posted by: Trent | February 07, 2008 at 09:33 AM
If you'd like to try out beatmania or drummania/guitar freaks I can hook you up or lend the station the game(s) for a bit.
Posted by: john | February 10, 2008 at 01:57 AM
The guy in the above youtube video has actually wrapped his fingers in tape in order to prevent blisters, a la bassists. Can you believe that? Nail polish was a good guess, anyway!
Also, if you haven't heard this from others already, the US version of beatmania is pretty terrible. Ugly interface, hilariously crippled songlist with a terrible difficulty progression, lots of removed features, and so on. Worth it for the cheap controller, but it makes a terrible first impression. Of course, I know people who really liked the US version, too, so who knows!
Posted by: Jason Moses | February 10, 2008 at 07:18 PM
For real "Techno-Hero", try Harmonix's early games before Guitar Hero, FreQuency and Amplitude. Those games also allow you to remix the tracks, which is really fun.
Amplitude on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB9ZhLBSoBQ
Posted by: StrangeDays | February 10, 2008 at 07:19 PM
Thank you for such great information
Thanks
Nail Polish
Posted by: Nail Polish | August 18, 2008 at 03:59 PM
Guess blogging is about everything indeed! Nice post here. I'm one of those game fanatics too.
Posted by: Christopher John | June 25, 2009 at 04:47 PM