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| If trolling is involved then it should be copied and pasted here in its entirity by Jhoh Clbbl O_____O 12/10/2007, 4:21pm PST | ||||
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| FRONT
INFINITE LIVES DARREN ZENKO / darren@vueweekly.com Mini guitar, major case of post-punk trauma Any long-term gamer has had his—we’re mostly guys, us 30-year vets—share of disappointing reactions from non-gaming girlfriends and associated females. Rolled eyes, scoffing, expressions of outright disgust, shocking demonstrations of time-jealousy ... a trail of ugly scenes, navigated with difficulty, at the end of which lies the inevitable closet-bound cardboard box, within which consoles gather dust and cartridges’ contacts corrode. Being able to chalk game-time to “work” has made things easier for me, but the games themselves can be tough to justify to the girl; six-odd hours of death-screams and machine-gun chatter filtering through my office door don’t do much to back up my “exciting new art form!” arguments. Still, my finacée is open minded enough that we’ve managed to have our share of bleep-blorp fun together, and music’s kind of her thing, so when I got my Guitar Hero III package I figured on a good chance for some quality bonding over classic rockin’ tracks and that adorable mini Gibson. You know how we nerds get with new toys. Got that thing out of the box and snapped together, strapped it on and kind of wore it around the house for a while, clacking and clicking at the fretbuttons and strumswitch while waiting for the kettle to boil—pretending to pretend-play and pretend guitar. Finally, after dinner and a genteel cocktail hour—brandy toddies—the time for rocking was at hand. I fired up the 360 and handed Ali the faketar. She bobbled it, badly, but that’s just the way it goes with neophytes before they get the basic Guitar Hero chops down. Scowling, she passed the axe off to me. I figured I’d start with a gentle little showing of the ropes, an easy lope through Foghat’s “Slow Ride,” one of the legendiest of the games titular “Legends of Rock”. Hold me! Roll me! Slow ridin’ woman you’re so fine! “YOU ROCK!” the game tells me. Avatar Judy Nails does her little fuck-you victory attitude dance. I look over my shoulder to see how my lady’s reacting to my obviously awesome display of rock-reflex button-pressing skills. She’s weeping. Full-on, shuddering weeping; from the dampness of her cheeks, I guessed she’d been weeping since somewhere around the fourth repetition of “slow ride/take it easy.” The miniGib clatters plastic to the floor; no echoing clang of solidbody and electrified strings. “Baby, what ... ?” “This is sick,” she cries. “This hurts me! It literally makes me want to puke!” She runs out of the room to the kitchen. I figure, what the hell? Overreaction; maybe the toddies got to her head? Maybe some kind of horrible Foghat memory from back in the day? Even the most negative—indifferent, really—online snark review hadn’t gone so far as “makes me want to puke.” I slap at the pause button and scramble after her to the kitchen. She’s puffy and pained at the gingham-clothed table, still crying. “Sweetheart, what the hell? It’s just a game ... ” “It’s fucking stupid! Is that what we worked for? Is that what it comes to after everything we believed in?” “C’mon baby ... it’s a game. It’s a simple little skill and reflex game vectored through a caricature of Rock ... ” Well, Ali came up through old-school punk times, right out from the ‘70s, and the caricature of “rock ‘n’ roll” presented via Guitar Hero is anathema to everything she’d fought against—or thought she’d fought against. What remnants of “punk” are present in the GH aesthetic are co-opted cartoons of something that maybe meant something once ... and for Ali they sure as hell don’t belong mashed up with “rocker” styles. “It’s sick. The Guns N’ Roses bitches used to spit at me, spit at my face, spit in my hair. My friend Rodney got beat up so bad by “rockers” that his ear turned black. We thought he was going to lose his ear!” Those old wounds (aural, spiritual) from old street-battles (aural, spiritual) are still fresh, still real, and the decontextualized cartoon iconography of Guitar Hero III and its classic rawk-heavy tracklist, and my blank-faced flapping at a toy guitar in time with music made by and for assholes, have triggered the girl’s post-punk post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s had an allergic reaction. We fight about it for a while, me mostly fighting defensively, out of shock: Guitar Hero is fun! What the hell? This is the reactionary conservatism of a lapsed old punk! Get with it! How is “Rock And Roll All Nite” so sacred that a dumb videogame can defile it? “Rock and roll” is a joke, anyway ... “ROCK AND ROLL IS NOT A FUCKING JOKE!” And then, I start to realize she’s right. I sulk back to my gaming office and half-assedly stumble through “Barracuda” out of sheer stubbornness, but my heart’s nowhere near it. The plastic chunking of the fretbuttons and the clicking of the strum bar are louder than the soundtrack, no matter how loud I crank up the TV volume. In my first “boss battle,” against a smirking avatar of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, I totally shit the bed out of sheer disinterest. I jab the 360 off with my toe and toss the dinky guitroller onto my half-deflated beanbag chair. I gess punk’s not dead. V |
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