What I've Learned Lately

Last weekend, I played Guitar Hero 3 for the first time, so naturally I'm addicted and am thinking about nothing but music again. My first thought after playing the game is "wow, I'm addicted". My second thought was "hey, why can't playing a real guitar be this much fun?"

By shear coincidence, IT Conversations released a talk by Raph Koster on Monday entitled "A Theory of Fun", which I listened to, which got me thinking more about how to make music fun. Fun, roughly speaking, is about learning, and is about a balance between too easy and too hard. There's obviously more to it than that, but kids think tic-tac-toe is fun, until they figure out that every game played well is a draw, then they move on. I've had loads of fun with various programming tasks, but only until I've explored them fully, at which point they become boring and I look for something else to do.

Then I started thinking about Runescape, which I've played way too much of over the past few months. RS has roughly 30 "skills" that you can gain experience in and "level up". The initial thrill of RS was learning how each skill worked, but even now, I find myself switching back and forth, trying to raise my lowest, working on the most fun, going back to one I haven't done in a while, etc. Some are exciting, some are flat out boring, but each can be fun, depending on my mood at the moment, how much of a challenge I want, etc.

Then back to Guitar Hero 3. I saw my nephew play one of the harder songs (on Easy, but it was still a challenge). I just laughed; no way would I start out on that. I went through the tutorials, then worked my way up through a few of the easier (yet fun) songs I knew. By the end of the evening, I had completed Cliffs of Dover twice, and was loving it.

I got a couple of insights from that. First, on a real instrument, I wanna play like Leo Kottke. Right now. (Ha, ha, only serious.) With GH3, I was much more realistic. Start simple, work your way up. RS does that, too. Start small, put in the time, get leveled up gradually.

Secondly, I was grooving on the feedback that GH3 gives. Not sure what to do about that re:real instruments, (an instructor can be paid to give feedback; perhaps I can find others to play with on occasion as well), but I at least realize that it's an issue.

Perhaps obviously, I shouldn't expect to progress on a real instrument as fast as I did on GH3 or RS. Those games lower the bar for what you have to do to progress, to keep folks playing. But I think I can do a much better job of breaking down learning music into smaller, more easily accomplished tasks, which can serve the same purpose.

So I'm going to be putting together a list of "skills" that I can move around among, to keep things interesting. One of them will be playing along with music I have and know (similar to me playing the songs in GH3 that I knew and liked), but I'll be quick(er) to say about any given song, "that one is a level (or dozen) above where I am right now; I'll save that one for later", rather than what I've been thinking, which is "there's no way I can do that".

Which leads to my last "thing I've learned lately", which I've known all along, but was still fun to see. I watched "Meet the Robinsons" last night, and just loved the scene where the kid had just used an invention to spew PBJ over the whole family, and was cringing, expecting them to be upset. They recoil, turn on him, and ... start cheering: "Yay! You failed!!" Yes, I can celebrate failure. I may not find joy in missing a note, but I can start looking at such failures as a reason to figure out why, and as an incentive to keep trying.