The other day I saw four guys playing Rock Band do a 100% perfect performance of Dani California… well, the computer had told them it was 100%. It is actually technically a difficult thing to do to play Dani California all the way through, but what they were doing was repeating a series of notes in an exact order, which isn’t quite the same thing. A few weeks earlier, at a party at a friend’s house, we played a karaoke console game, which was a lot of fun. During the evening, someone got a very good score on Me and Bobby McGee; the game was basing it on the Joplin version, and I was struck by the way the game scored you on getting the ad libs right– it rather breaks my brain to be able to figure out what it means to get an ad lib “right”, especially on a song Joplin was covering in the first place!
So what we have is a place where a very few people are the creators,and they get scored on their work, and if the rest of the world produces anything it’s scored for fidelity to the creators’ work rather than how well it builds on things.
There is a TV programme in the US called Wheel of Fortune where a woman called Vanna White puts big square letter cards on a wall. She is very famous for doing this. Samsung made a commercial based around a robot putting letters on a wall with reference to what she does; she sued them and won. It seems she’s the only person allowed to go around putting big square letter cards on a wall. One judge wrote in his dissenting opinion: “Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture”. (I hope he won’t mind me quoting that.)
Chumbawamba released an album whose title is “The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother’s hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don’t just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to ‘guard’ any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it’s over, then it’s done, and the boy bands have won.”
It has often been the same way in the past, with a small elite of creators. But not all subcultures have been this way even in the developed world in the recent past. I’m happy that the free software world means there are more and more creators, and that the licences we use mean that people are encouraged to “restyle it, refashion it to the point where it becomes their own”, but we need to find more and more ways to encourage and spread the idea that it’s desirable or even possible to do so. Getting free software onto more desktops is an admirable goal, an important first step, but we need to help people understand they can be more than consumers.
(Disclaimer: I have never played Rock Band, and I suck mightily at Guitar Hero; I hope this isn’t sour grapes.)
Ironic that you should refer to xkcd in support of your point:
http://xkcd.com/359/
encapsulates what you get wrong perfectly. No-one plays Rock Band under the illusion that they are doing anything creative or particularly ‘useful’. They play it because *playing it is a lot of fun*.
Sorry, I should flesh that out a bit. You, like a lot of people, worry that games like RB are somehow inimical to creativity because they don’t deal with creativity, they reward perfect replication of a semi-arbitrary mapping of a song to roughly analogous actions on fake controllers.
But, so what? The people who play RB are not, generally speaking, people who would otherwise be using that time to create real songs with real instruments, or write the next great American novel, or find a cure for cancer, or whatever. If people weren’t playing RB they’d most likely be a) playing another video game or b) watching television.
In the end it’s far more likely that games like RB will have either absolutely no net influence on the overall involvement of people with actual creativity, or will actually have a *positive* one, in terms of encouraging people to try the real thing. There are already several recorded instances of this.
You seem to be interpreting my post as an attack on RB. It wasn’t intended as such. It’s probably true that people who are playing RB would otherwise be playing another game or watching TV. Both of these could just as well have been used as examples of the same idea that there are a few creative people and the rest of us just consume. It’s not a new idea, and RB is just another of many, many examples; there’s nothing particularly special about it.
I don’t know whether I agree or disagree with your hypothesis;
“So what we have is a place where a very few people are the creators,and they get scored on their work, and if the rest of the world produces anything it’s scored for fidelity to the creators’ work rather than how well it builds on things.”
But I don’t see anything else in this post that backs this up. People enjoy playing Rock Band, which is a game that involves you mimicking someone’s performance of a song… I don’t know what that has to do with creativity, it’s a game. Sometimes people enjoy passive pursuits. Some woman sued an ad because it was influenced by her… People are greedy.
I think people are perfectly aware that they don’t just have to consume, but it involves effort to be creative. Perhaps people need to be made aware of how little effort can sometimes be required to be creative?
And as an aside, regarding Rock Band (and other similar games), what other possible way could this game work, given that musical taste is an entirely subjective thing and computers lack consciousness and emotion?