Rock Band's Alex Rigopulos:
The OXM Interview

Sometimes in the course of writing a story, we wind up with a boatload more information than we can ever hope to fit into the magazine. Our conversation with Alex Rigopulos during the creation of our Holiday 2007 issue’s Rock Band feature was one of those interviews. We only ran a fraction of Alex’s comments in the magazine feature, so we’re very happy to be able to offer the rest here online. (All we needed was a website – ha.) Alex talks about what he hopes people will get out of Rock Band and what drives Harmonix as a company, but he also discusses some wishes and loose plans for the future of Rock Band that, well, kinda blew our minds. Two words: Action figures!

OXM: A lot of gaming companies say “we want to offer the most intense, technological experience.” The Harmonix mission statement is much more artistic. You want people to feel something. So how do you strike a balance between Rock Band being musically satisfying and being a game?

ALEX RIGOPULOS: Well, so the driving mandate in all design decisions is we’re trying to summon the sensation of playing music as genuinely as possible. Of course, putting a game framework around that gives structure, gives goals to drive towards. But a key thing for us is that we never want to have gameplay intrude upon the music-making experience. In fact, there were lots of prototype game mechanics in Guitar Hero that we thought would be good for gameplay, and when we tried them out, we realized that they actually got the player thinking about game optimization and not thinking about the active music making. So for us it’s really about having a central design mandate that we always come back to when we come to key design decisions, “what’s more important here?” Well, for us it’s authenticity and genuine summoning of the music-making act.

OXM: We got a really interesting reader letter that said “You know, the problem with games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band is that it gives you a shortcut to that joy of playing music, and now people aren’t going to pick up a real guitar because, well, why would they if they can just get the rewards?” Do you think there’s any validity to that fear?

AR: I’d actually like to answer the question differently for the different instruments, first of all with respect to the guitar controller. The guitar controller is very abstracted from a real guitar (unlike the drums or the microphone which I’ll get back to later). But even in the case of the guitar controller there are some foundation skills that you learn. Rhythmic impulse with your right hand and independent pitch control with your left hand — those are foundation dexterity skills that if you build them up playing the game, they will translate to being able to lock in and play in rhythm. Even a lot of amateur musicians are poor at that. If you watch people as they start to play Rock Band there’s a tendency to rush — all people have a tendency to rush because they get excited and they start going too fast. By playing the game it forces them to settle down, relax, listen to the beat, internalize it and start playing with their ears and not just their eyes. And that process is also a foundation step to developing musicianship. So there actually are real musical skills that you get from playing the game that translate into those first base skills in playing guitar or any instrument, really.

The other thing that it provides is — well, one way to look at it is a shortcut — but a kind of a window into the payoff. If you just start playing an instrument and all you get is the frustration of “this isn’t fun” why continue? But when you’ve been given a window into the experience and you realize how good it feels in the simulated version, that gives you the motivation to butt your head up against that wall and keep working, and start building up the calluses on your fingers when you’re learning your first barre chords.

It’s not going to work for everybody; it’s not like anybody who plays Guitar Hero is going to go on and be a guitarist. But it will teach some foundation skills and it will motivate some people who otherwise wouldn’t have, to actually go on and do it. That’s not just theoretical on my part, a message that we get again and again is “Oh my god, I got so excited about guitar and rock and roll music in general from guitar hero that I’ve not started studying guitar.” That’s a message we hear all the time. We even hear from guitar instructors that their business has been booming in the past couple of years because of new interest in rock music and guitar that’s come out of Guitar Hero. The empirical evidence dictates otherwise with respect to stimulus to musicianship, just on the guitar.

Now that’s in the case of the guitar, where I said the guitar is abstracted from the real instrument. The singing game, first of all is actually singing, there’s no abstraction whatsoever. Second of all the game actually makes you a better singer, it made me a better singer. Just getting the feedback when you’re singing as to whether or not you’re singing sharp for flat in real time. People start paying attention and they start refining their pitch to score better in the game. But what happens is that people start singing better, in key, by playing the game. The drums are actually the most incredible of all because unlike the guitar controller, the drums aren’t very far abstracted from a real electronic drum set. When you start playing the game, you don’t have any real skill or talent as a drummer — the patterns are very simplified, we only use a couple of the pads, and the note density is really thinned out so that it’s accessible to someone that has no experience. But as you work your way up to the higher difficulty songs and difficulty settings within the game, by the time you’ve been playing the game for a few weeks or a few months on the advanced setting the note patterns you’re playing are the real note for note drum patterns for the original music — which we’ve trained you to play!

You can take a person that’s playing on the expert levels in Rock Band on the drums and put them on a real drum set, and they can play the drums. And I watched this happen with a Q&A staff of 25-30 people. Maybe 2 or 3 of those had experience of being drummers, but they’ve been playing the game for months now, and what we’ve got is 30 drummers in the Q&A department who are pounding away in the Hard and Expert settings. These people have learned the fundamentals of drums, and this isn’t abstracting fundamentals — you can put these people on a drum set and they have some basic skills now. As a payoff for playing a video game, that’s incredible! Rock Band is going to be out there training this wave of new young drummers, and that’s a really exciting aspect of the project for us.

OXM:  Will we see a wireless cowbell?

AR: Uh, I’ll have to get back to you on that. We have some top secret nuclear scientists working on wireless percussion peripherals that may or may not exist at this moment in time.

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