Posted by cheeaun 1 day ago
Spoken like someone who never actually played the games. GH developed my interest in music as a kid, and Rock Band actually taught me how to drum in real life. It also garnered my interest in picking up and learning real guitar.
Those who forget that Rock Band not only a) existed and b) did everything GH did but a thousand times better + created by real musicians (Harmonix) do the genre, industry, and this article, injustice.
This article is written by someone stretching and reaching to relate two unrelated things. I'm offended by this.
No, you didn't.
You're straw manning an argument that doesn't exist in the article
I'm not aware of any studies proving or disproving that this gives beginners a head start, but it would be an interesting thing to investigate.
A categorical "Nice try, but you've just been wasting your time" seems overconfident.
I actually do sight read for a couple of instruments- nothing in any of those games has literally anything to do with that.
Hell, my (very good) reading for clarinet and double bass has nothing to do with my (very poor) ability to sight read on piano.
Whatever gets folks interested in stuff is great, but to me it's like saying "I watched 10K hours of MTV in the 80s and that was very helpful in my career playing jazz"...
The same thing is true with writing and other skills replacements- much of my ability and desire to write comes from the experience of using it as an adjunct to thinking.
Having to figure out how I should connect ideas and state them in a way others will understand clarifies my own thoughts, so the idea that I am somehow gaining idunnowhat by adding a bunch of verbal noise to my writing misses a lot of the reasons why I like to write.
I'm happy to use LLMs to draft things like the contracts I need for the mechanical royalty payments I make when I record other folks material, but that's only because I am not trying to learn how to think legalistically.
And further, creating documents via might spark an interest in legal language and how it get used, but it's not going to help me understand the underlying reasons for what's going on any more than watching a whole lot of porn is going to help me be a better lover...
I got my start in drumming from playing on Rockband. When I mentioned it to the folk that I bought my first e-kit, they rolled their eyes. Fine, whatever, I expect musicians to be pretentious.
But yanno what? I still learned a lot. The controller itself was midi-capable so I was able to hook it up to my kit and play the game while practicing my form and timing. Was it perfect? Fuck no; it sucked. But it guided me into recognizing that I wasn't as good as I wanted to be, which led to lessons and many many hours of practicing.
I owe a lot to rock band because it opened a world of play beyond the game itself.
I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice.
But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game.
In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life.
For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education".
As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life.
And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions.
So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things.
I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order.
I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans.
My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days.
I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself.
But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing.
In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.
I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions.
So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.
In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.
The only people who are saying that way are people who have negative feelings towards the game in the context of music. To me, that's pretentiousness because it assumes the thoughts of the people who play the game. It reminds me of people talking shit about Chicago who've never been to Chicago.
But ultimately I think my point is that people are going to flail, but we shouldn't immediately assume that people don't get anything out of them. You seem to have an absolute position that it's all or nothing -- surely you don't actually think you've learned NOTHING from playing Fallout? Nothing about yourself? Nothing about game mechanics? There's much more to learn than what's "formally" presented and each person gets something different.
Like, I've been playing with cipher mechanisms with LLMs... and after getting frustrated with all that, I'm now learning how to draw so that I can make my own similar cryptographic puzzles. Wouldn't have gotten there if I hadn't stumbled blindly for a bit. So in the same way that you wouldn't invalidate my path towards music, I'd hope you wouldn't invalidate my path towards drawing. There's a middle point somewhere in between that you seem hesitant to intellectually venture towards.
What is that?
Arrested development?
Sure, it’s all gamified and fun and even addictive, but at the end of the day no outside, transferable skill accrues to the player. To do that, you have to set the controller down, pick up an actual guitar, and start another, entirely different journey. And perhaps some Guitar Hero player did or will, which is awesome. It means at some point they were not satisfied with pretending to play the guitar, following someone else’s rules and set-up. They still started, effectively, at zero. There was a whole new skill tree to be learned that had very little to do with the game, outside of the shape of the controller.
Boring people use it in boring ways, interesting people use it in interesting ways.
The rest is old man yells at cloud, like how people criticized "laptop music" or photography.
I don't know how to play guitar, yet I can play guitar hero. My friend who plays guitar cannot play guitar hero. I'm not interested in playing guitar and I don't find GH to be a "shortcut" to learn it. In fact, I play the piano and I'm okay like that.
So you are good at different things. Maybe not at a real guitar but perhaps at reaction times.
I say this as someone who had one of those plug-in guitars but never knew how to use it, hah.
> Guitar hero is not harder or easier than guitar.
Ladies and gents, peak dunning krueger moment.
Has anyone ever claimed otherwise?
What are your thoughts on games like Keyboard Hero?
But AI actually does something unlike Guitar Hero. There is a real output that can be used tomorrow even if AI "goes away".
You say AI helps you learn no skills, essentially. I don't know about you, but AI helped me understand Linux better in a way I didn't feel confident I would be able to before AI. I have created code with AI that I can maintain, and understand without it.
AI can go in conjunction with learning manually and can be helpful. Just because many examples exist of AI being unhelpful does not mean the whole technology is unhelpful.
I explored this idea with ChatGPT, asking it to make some reference images. I also asked for some prompt generation. I have weak sketching abilities (it's on my list to improve), so this is how I "storyboard".
To be cheeky, I asked Claude to make balloon simulator from which I could eventually drop into Fusion360 to muck with and 3D print. CamelKoons was born! [1]
I wanted a Golang backend and web frontend. Fable pretty much one-shotted the step-one scaffolding: Golang physical simulation of a single balloon, streaming geometry to a Web application. Vibed through various issues and then step two was multiple balloons with twists (which were just choke points).
In the world of disposable, hyper-focused software, this tool remained static to Dromedary Camel topologies. A generalized topology feature is left as an exercise for the reader's LLM.
I like empowering my agents to loop [2]. So, I used Claude-in-Chrome to do some loops where Claude positioned the Camel and could screenshot it. I also gave it an HTTP endpoint to position the camera for itself and me.
Eventually, I wanted to push views and comments from the Web page, so I added a comment box. Claude Code used its new-to-me "monitoring" feature to watch for that action and react to it in the session. Claude made itself a "look-at-camel" skill, so cute! [3]
While the balloons were looking interesting, I noted it wasn't very Koons-like and Claude reminded me that Koons was art and we were doing physical simulation. So then we started distorting the physical model. Of course we also added model export, etc.
After tokenmaxxing, I ended up with something that was a cross between a poop emoji and an alien dildo.
I'm now learning the Forms feature in Fusion360 and following a great balloon-dog tutorial on YouTube. I think this guitar approach will win out over my Guitar Hero approach.
[1] https://github.com/cameltopia/CamelKoons
[2] https://github.com/ConAcademy/WeaselToonCadova
[3] https://github.com/Cameltopia/CamelKoons/blob/main/.claude/s...
I cannot ask the video game why my real guitar is out of tune, or diagnose why I'm holding the fret wrong.
And presumably there would be similarly thousands of posts saying things like "I love my nutri-paste, it lets me skip the boring part of cooking my meals straight to the eating and getting calories and vitamins which is the real purpose of eating anyways"