Anything pertaining to the Guitar Hero/Rock Band duopoly garners exhaustive attention nowadays. So it’s no surprise that Neversoft’s major follow-up to Guitar Hero III is bigger in most every way in a bid to unseat Rock Band with its immersive group play.

IGN: Guitar Hero World Tour Preview

But under the face-melting surface, World Tour’s greater influence may ultimately be in the steady march towards unifying simulation (pretend you’re a rock star!) and emulation (make actual music!). In the past we’ve come to this junction from the other direction, using game platforms as engines for music production: MTV Music Generator series on the Playstation 2 (used by artists like Boomkat to sketch out songs), Nanaloop on the Game Boy (part of the 8-bit music movement), and upcoming touch-studio offerings for the iPhone like MooCowMusic’s Band and Intua’s BeatMaker. Meanwhile, rhythm games by the likes of Harmonix (Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero) and Konami’s Bemani division (Beatmania, Dance Dance Revolution, GuitarFreaks) have gradually introduced ever more elaborate interactions between players and underlying musical performances. In FreQuency, for example, a secondary mode allowed players to ‘remix’ songs in freeform fashion after unlocking them through normal play.

Based on this early preview, World Tour is even more ambitious with its Music Creator mode. While normal gameplay will center around the established note-matching mechanism for various instruments, the proposed editor supports multi-track note creation for each of the supported instruments (minus vocals, evidently for legal reasons—cross apply the perversities that abound in most online smack talk and this makes regrettable sense). Premade loops, tempo control, and beat quantizing are provided within a wizard interface to simplify the learning curve. For laying down tracks, the guitar controller provides extensive options: you can program drum machines through the new touch-sensitive fret strip on the guitar controller, trigger samples by fret buttons, change pitch with the strum bar and sample speed through the Star Power tilt control. Need more crunch? Licensed Pod modeling technology from Line 6 lets you can choose your amplifier. Want to generate notes algorithmically? Use the built-in arpeggiator. Once you’ve finished laying down tracks, a separate mix mode is available for looping and editing. Finally, you publish your creation (complete with custom cover art) to an online community store where others can download and play it within the game. User ratings will drive online charts. Voilá, you’re a published musician.

One of the most common comment-thread trolls since the release of Guitar Hero has been purist backlash: "why not play a real guitar?" Up to now, the typical answer is along the lines of, "because this [playing a simplified game]  is more fun than learning the real thing." And certainly, to remain successful, World Tour will need to retain that sense of rock star power at mere mortal effort levels. But the potential for the Creator mode, and whatever follows it, to create a new level of musical expression suggests an exciting future of entertainment all its own.

Courtesy of TNG, a collection of reimagined covers for the Atari 2600 [note to young'uns: cover images themselves are original, with only new titles added]. Surprisingly I can only immediately identify Defenders and Yars’ Revenge. Look for the passing references to both Harry Potter and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Mightygodking » Fun From Yesterday!

Nick Paumgarten’s piece on “the lives of elevators” starts and ends with the tragic tale of Nicholas White, who spent 41 hours trapped in an elevator back in 1999. But the story is really about the science of vertical people-movers, which enable the high-rise and thus urban architecture itself - “two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator.”

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays

The essay covers the safety features and record of elevators, their basic construction, their efficiency of design and energy. Their role in media, even the dearth of elevator poetry, are mentioned (along with a perfectly appropriate use of ‘vertiginous’), with the observation that as a plot device, it serves:

“…to bring characters together, as a kind of artificial enforcement of proximity and conversation. The brevity of the ride suits the need for a stretch of witty or portentous dialogue, for stolen kisses and furtive arguments. For some people, the elevator ride is a social life.”

We learn of the elevator variant of claustrophobia and behavioral elevator therapy. We meet vertical transportation consultants like James Fortune, who engineer a building’s ‘elevatoring’ - its handling of ‘human traffic.’ The science of elevator planning is built on physics of space and psychology of time, plus the probabilities of human behavior. The elevatoring plan of a building must keep wait times at a minimum, while allowing for cultural constraints on human proximity (measured by calculations such as the average ‘body ellipse,’ which vary between Western and Eastern even as they do between urban and rural notions of ‘personal space’) and using as little room as possible to impact the building’s overall architecture. New innovations such as ‘destination dispatch’ pre-program floor routing based on rider pools, but at the cost of the illusion of user control over elevator movement. Meanwhile, fundamental limits such as cable length - any climb higher than 1700 feet and the hoist rope will snap under its own weight - require innovations like sky lobbies to act as transfer points midway up towers that can now scale a mile high.

Outside of the article, Paumgarten also recently appeared on NPR’s Talk of the Nation where it’s mentioned that his ongoing assignment is to cover ‘journeys’ which at least explains how traveling up and down got coverage.

For my part, the only operator-run elevator still in service I can recall using is at the San Francisco Rasputin’s music store, where the upper floors are only accessible by rattletrap conveyance operated by precisely the kind of adjunct indie clerk you’d expect to work in a SF music store. So instead of only feeling defensive when you check out, you also have to weigh checking out another floor’s genre against the calculated disapproval you may detect in the implicit scoff of their pressing the button.

As for the science, elevatoring has already made a notable appearance in two games - the original SimTower (scheduled for re-release on Nintendo DS!) and its sequel, Yoot Tower. Many of the stated tips for good vertical building design - keeping cafeterias at ground level, adroit use of stairways and escalators - factored into gameplay, and key to success was sufficient elevatoring. Too few, and lines would grow at each floor’s chokepoint, and your sims would rapidly turn red; or your maids wouldn’t be able to clean all the hotel rooms and turn them before the next check-in; or, heaven forfend, your fire escape plan would fall short. Too many ‘vators and you blew your budget for that top floor cathedral. Perhaps all those hours I spent trying to ferry customers from a 40th floor cinema to the 3rd floor gift shops without affecting the hotel clientele has a practical outlet after all.

[Somewhat apropos, I just had a track by concept band Towering Inferno - not to be confused with The Towering Inferno - play while writing this.]

Among the flood of recent stories via CNN on autism and related spectrum disorders like Asperger’s syndrome (the debate over vaccines, links to a common sperm donor, the effectiveness of dietary treatment, and various anecdotal stories) was a report on therapeutic efforts within Second Life.

‘Naughty Auties’ battle autism with virtual interaction

When virtual reality (VR) was first demonstrated in the early 90s by early proponents like Jaron Lanier, one of the proposed benefits was for psychological treatment of nervous disorders such as phobias. One of the behavioral treatments for phobias is systemic desensitization, with gradual exposure to the triggering stimulus in a safe environment to re-condition the response. A VR environment can duplicate the phobic stimulus in varying degrees to acclimatize the patient to remaining calm.  A recent study covered in the British Journal of Psychiatry also used VR to observe paranoid spectrum behavior. The use of a VR environment for autism spectrum disorders is a parallel example of systemic sensitization, allowing individuals to practice social interactions and gain confidence in communicating in a protective simulacrum of real life.

Second Life also perhaps represents Lanier’s hope for the future of VR beyond its early roots in static gaming (e.g. BattleTech Centers) and corporate simulations for CAD and oil/gas modeling:

“The main element lacking in video games (compared to what I hope we’ll see in virtual reality) is an expressive power. And so, what I envision is not so much a pre-programmed virtual world that you might play as a game, but rather a virtual world that you can change from the inside; a world that people use as a form of expression, in which they’re creating things together. Just as people make up their own Web pages, they would make up little realities and visit each other’s realities, or co-create them. And I think that level of activity would give rise to really, really wonderful new sorts of human relationships and experiences.”

(Sun interview, The Future of Virtual Reality)

With all the hoopla surrounding the recent experiments with online distribution by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, the videogame Rock Band’s store expansion may represent a less heralded future venue. In contrast with the aforementioned big names which can trade on years of old-industry promotion, the Rock Band store has already provided a way to break new artists such as Paramore. Individual songs featured in the related title Guitar Hero 3 also showed sales spikes after the game’s release, similar to the Apple halo effect provided to Feist and Yael Naim after featuring their tracks in commercials. The game’s very name and history under the Guitar Hero franchise may suggest that the potential is limited to strictly rock acts, yet prior GH games have already highlighted alternative, electronic, indie, and pop artists including unsigned bands offered as unlockables.

The question remains, however - how exactly does a band get a song programmed for the game and loaded into the Rock Band store, and who are the gatekeepers? 

Rock Band meets iTunes, opens built-in music store

I had just been wondering when we might see a reincarnation of the seminal Rockstar Ate My Hamster band simulator. Red Marble Games has announced Rock Legend, which looks like a potential candidate. If you’re ready for a break from the hard work of rocking out in Guitar Hero/Rock Band and are ready to move up to a manager sim, check out the demo.

Kudos Rock Legend

Now I just need an update for still-Classic-only Sim Cinema Deluxe and Project Space Station.