Monday - January 28, 2008

Rock and Roll, part 2 

So this weekend, we played a LOT of Guitar Hero. That's the good news - everything else is Josh's fault.

Josh has this way of being almost on par with me on most video games. However, every time I think I've caught up to him in any sort of skill in any  sort of game, he's surpassed me just a little bit... not by leaps and bounds, ever, really, but he has the ability to play games on a single difficulty level higher than me rather consistently. I can't tell you how frustrating this is from a totally macho rivalry standpoint. If he were leaps and bounds over me, I could resign myself that he was just better coordinated, and that's the way it was. As it stands though, Josh has the nerve to appear as if I could compete with him, so the trickle of bull-headed testosterone junkie I allow to show through from time to time focuses on him like an obsessive compulsive frat boy, as I get my ass repeatedly kicked while telling myself, "just one more game, and I'll beat him!"

All dramatization aside, this actually works in my favor for two reasons : First, it spurs me to actually improve my game, rather than playing on "Medium" difficulty all my life because it's comfortable and I can win, and second, Josh and I are actually very good-natured about this little rivalry, and the thought of it actually coming between us is unthinkable.

However, to address the previously mentioned first point, this seemed to be the focal point of the weekend for me (aside from Aberrant, which was fun as always). Josh, Ed, and I (and bit of Jason, who's improving greatly in the game he only picked up last weekend) sat in front of the TV, cranked the stereo, and jammed out until we lost feeling in our arms. Josh was, and has been for a month or two, playing on Hard mode. I, on the other hand, had only really started to become comfortable with more than the one or two songs I could do on Hard. So, feeling proud of myself for breaking out of my shell, told Josh exactly this.

In retrospect, I should have known what his response would have been ahead of time.

"Oh, cool! I've been playing in Expert."

He's WHAT? Play..... Expert..... buh...... how....? Expert is like..... insane.

And, of course, the testosterone jockey in the back of my mind starts shouting, "Are you going to let him get away with that!?!" To which my reply, of course, was "HELL NO!" The Testosterone Jockey shouts, "HOORAH!" and slams a beer, and then starts making a bunch of incomprehensible hooting noises as I grab a guitar and kick the difficulty on a song I've never played before up to Hard and join the fray.

And this is where my discussion goes from adolescent rivalry to Zen, and my understanding of the "Void Mind" that you hear about so often in Bruce Lee movies. The concept behind Void Mind, or No Mind, is that you have to just clear your head... and I don't mean clear it as in, quit worrying about your homework or the fact that there are three guys with swords trying to kill you... I mean, wipe it clean of any conscious thought, and just let instincts and training take over everything. Don't think.

Now, I'm not saying I'm a zen master. I'm not saying I'm a ninja or anything like that. I'm just saying, is that I think I hit that zone a few times this weekend, and it's a surreal experience.

The first step was realizing a simple fact : that I was limiting myself through placing invisible constraints on how I was playing the guitar. There are five fret buttons, and four fingers to push them with. Now, unfortunately, Medium difficulty does horrible harm to the way you think about the guitar - it only uses the first four buttons. "So? Sounds like a decent difficulty curve to me" you might say. And it is, except that it trains you to think, "Four fingers, four buttons." You line your fingers up on the four buttons, forsaking the orange key just beyond your pinky, and entrench your hand there, because you don't need to move it.

And then Hard comes along, adds the orange key, and you're still mired into thinking that you must have a finger on a fret at all times. How do you train yourself to move your hand down the fret board to hit that orange one? Do you view it as 4 and 4? (Green / Red / Yellow / Blue one one set, and Red / Yellow / Blue / Orange on the second) Most do, because it's easier to build off a system your comfortable with, rather than telling yourself that the previous system was shit, and to get over it and think outside the box for once.

Once you've done that though, you come to a realization, whether you make it consciously or not - It's not 4 and 4. It's 5. Plain and simple, you have 5 frets. Do what you need to to hit them. Hands can move, fingers can slide from chord to chord like a real guitar, and there is no "proper" finger to hit a fret with. After that, you can move to the Void Mind because you stop worrying about where your fingers are or if you're holding the guitar correctly.

So, somewhere in the middle of jamming out with "Carry On My Wayward Son," the main guitar riff came up, and my fingers just did. And I know they did because it was a Star Power run, and I hit it. (for those of you not acquainted with the game, a Star Power run gives you bonus points, but you must hit all of the notes. A single miss and the whole combo goes away. However, there's a bright flashy visual effect if you do hit them all, which I witnessed happen after my fingers moved like they do.) It was surreal to say the least. I actually felt like I was just spectating, and my hand belonged to someone else far more skilled than I. The fingers flew, and somehow, without thinking about colors or frets or rhythm or why the hell they'd name the band "Kansas," they remarkably hit the associated colors on the screen and I jammed like I was a real rock star.

This happened several other times this weekend, and I think I finally have a bit of understanding into how it's done. Now if I could only remotely do that on Dance Dance Revolution, we'd have something.

None of this, however, made "Hangar 18" by Megadeth any easier... but I still beat it.