Why Guitar Hero rocks?

The list below is an exercise done by all students (30 people) of the master with the supervision of design professor. The exercise consists in analyzing Guitar Hero and why it works so good and succeeds. Neither the graphics nor the kind of music are taken in consideration, only the gameplay aspects that make a good game. The list isn't made by order of importance.

• Body rhythm. Can’t play it on the sofa -do you remember body play?-.
• How are you doing it indicator. A thermometer that goes up with every hit and goes down with every miss. This produces satisfaction.
• A metronome on the reel show us the rhythm.
• To have point multipliers when you're doing it well, has sense in this game because you can memorize, and each time you do it better. Multipliers are a kind if recompense.
  
• But it isn’t only about memorize. There are ability components.
• Hands synchronization. To play a real guitar is very difficult because hands must play asynchronized. In guitar hero they work at the same rhythm.
• One button more than useful fingers. When playing with the guitar we only use four fingers of the hand. This is very interesting. Guitar Hero is a social game, where you can brilliant in front of friends or you don’t have any idea but can have lots of fun with friends. To play the fool inside video games context works, it’s fun. This is what Wii attained, people playing together and laughing at each other.
• Progressive difficulty with songs, the faster the reel goes the more difficult gets.
• Sound feedback, making you think you’re playing the guitar, and shows you if you got it wrong or not.
• The colors of guitar buttons coincidence with colors of the reel. Button order have the same order as the screen order. Trying this in reverse order, would be very difficult.
• The reel comes from far to near allowing you to get ready for the increasing expectations.
• Notes/second.How many notes per second are fun? Few notes could be boring. This can be the most difficult thing to find.

You may think that these are only little details, but these are the things that make the difference. It looks easy to find what works in a video game, but it isn’t. Our first homework was the analysis of a video game created before 1982 -MAME is an excellent emulator to play old games-. Why before 1982? Because until 1982, the video games were more or less simple and overall, the graphics are not important. A way of focus only on the game play. I’ve chosen Tank Battalion from Namco, 1980. It’s easy to find things which work but it isn’t to explain why.

The beginning

Sorry, no much time to write!

As you know on Monday 6th I began the Master, we began with an introduction of the course, then each student said which were their favourite genre and video games. The director, Daniel Sanchez Crespo, told something interesting about many of these video games. The second day we started with game design, also with the director. After this class, I realized that I had been listening to him for three hours without distraction -something very difficult to do-. The director didn’t talk about video games -well, at the end a little bit-. He explained things about the human being and why he loves to play. It was a kind of anthropologic class, since the cavern men to our days. So, why do we play? There are three points:

• To do and learn new things that could be useful.
• To challenge, thinking in natural selection, where only who adapts to the environment survives.
• Because it’s something innate to mammals.

In the end, these three points are due to the brain, who, when it believes that it is doing or learning something useful pays the body by segregating an hormone called dopamine, the hormone of the reward. I’m not going to develop this theme you have all the information about dopamine in the Wikipedia. I’m explaining it all very resumed.

He continued explaining the games evolution, their exponential growth since the Industrial Revolution, when the concept of pay to play and new kind of games appear. Then, in the Twentieth Century the National Institute for Play appears in the USA and creates a lists of elemental forms of play. The examples of play forms are of video games, but could be of any type of game:

• Attunement play: Ico, when I've played with this game I'll write about it.
  
• Body play & Movement: Wii, the best example.
  
• Object play: Rubik's cube.
  
• Social play: Any MMO.
  
• Imaginative and pretend play: Any classic game.
  
• Storytelling-Narrative play: Any classic game.
  
• Transformative-Integrative and Creative play: Little Big Planet.
  

Nowadays, most video games are in included in imaginative and pretend play and storytelling-narrative play, but as the director said, we have to find the new potential markets, as Nintendo has done with the Wii -body play- or games like Nintendogs -attunement play-. The director sticked out the games Ico and Shadow of the Colossus of PlayStation 2, who play with the emotions of the player. I haven’t played with them, actually I haven’t got a PlayStation 2 -I was a proud owner of a Xbox, but dreamed of these games-. By luck, a friend is going to lend them to me -thanks Jordi! I’m anxious to play them-.

But I think, that that some things, can’t be done in the final project of the master. We don’t have enough time to do a long video game. Also, the director said that we’ve got to think about the final project as a demo of ten minutes that make us think that this game is awesome. This will be our presentation into the business. Then, we have to surprise, looking for new things. Let’s see what happens.