When Guitar Hero came out there were knee-jerk complaints from musicians and generally cranky people that the game wasn’t the same as actually playing an instrument (duh) and that the pissy teenagers with too much time on their hands who might eventually become musicians were going to use up all their rage and/or boredom on Guitar Hero instead of obsessively practicing scales or writing teen-angst punk or whatever.
Of course, wasting insane, even sickening amounts of time on video games is at least a generation-old tradition. And only the most imaginative (or delusional) advocates for Guitar Hero think that it’s meaningfully comparable to actually playing guitar—anecdotal evidence suggests that the Guitar Hero explosion has been quite good to guitar teachers, who’ve seen a bunch of kids looking to transition to the real thing. (This includes the guitar teacher on my block, who regularly hosts students mangling the fuck out of blues scales in really fascinating and original ways. It’s like living down the street from Captain Beefheart sometimes.)
But then there’s stuff like this: