I mean, playing music and playing video games just seem like two totally opposite activities. It's a weird feeling, when you haven't seen a full garage band in action before, to walk into a room and see 4 people standing stock-still in a semi circle each playing an instrument and staring at the TV screen with that glazed-over look. It's just funny. Maybe I'm biased because I am really bad at video games, so it's hard for me to get into them. If it doesn't catch my interest within 30 seconds, I will play one game and then can't focus on it anymore. Same thing happens with beer pong actually. I kind of suspect that the real reason is I can't do activities that involve my body doing one thing and my eyes focusing on something else. For example,
Soccer: you're supposed to look up as much as possible, not down at your feet. That was a disaster for me.
Video games: hands are moving around pressing buttons, but it's hard for me to do that while paying attention to a screen at the same time.
...I can't think of any more examples. But anyways, GarageBand is a funny concept to me. I get why it's fun, but it also reminds me how much the world is getting digitalized. Music used to be sound coming directly out of the instrument. You have total bodily control over what it produces. Then, speakers came around, and you still control the instrument, but the sound gets altered and comes out of a different piece of equipment. Then we got MIDI, which takes recordings of instruments making different sounds, breaks it all up into smaller segments and incorporates it into a software program. The music you create then is computer manipulation of different sounds previously recorded, with the physical instrument completely removed from the process. And garageband, now we've come back to the instrument (because it's fun to hold and utilize), except that it's really a representation of the real thing, and the game system controls the way all music sounds. And the point is not really to make music at all, it's to play a game.
Yayy technology, for making real-life situations as abstract as possible!
You still get to really sing in rock band though... for me that's what makes it fun! But yeah, I get what you're saying. I like it better than other video games also because you're playing WITH your friends and it's a good group/party game, not for the musical integrity of any of it.
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