Guitar Hero: Bridging a Generation Gap?
Monday, February 9, 2009
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For Christmas my wife and I bought our son the game, Guitar Hero World Tour for the Wii. I am not a big gaming person, by any stretch of the imagination. However, I love this game. It is something that I can actually get into, as there is some really good music in it, and it actually challenges my hand/eye coordination. Not that other games don’t challenge me, quite the opposite. Usually I can’t even figure the damn things out.
In this game, there is some really good music. There are songs that I never thought that my son, who is six, would like. All of the songs that he is singing along to are ones that were famous when I was a kid, or earlier. For instance, he likes the song “One Way or Another” by Blondie and “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. He will actually sing along with the lyrics when he hears them on the radio, or on television shows.
I am happy to see this happening, as I am hoping to instill in him a desire to listen to music that will be “classic” by the time that he is choosing his favorite bands. The last place I thought that he would be learning this music from is a video game. I have tried introducing him to certain music while in the car or anytime that we are just sitting together watching TV, as I try to have it on VH1 Classic as much as possible. He wants nothing to do with it though, so I usually wind up having to turn it to Spongebob.
However, if a video game has a song in it and he spends quite a bit of time playing that video game, he will start to recognize the song and start to learn the lyrics. Back when I was a kid, we had to record it from the radio, then rewind and pause the tape to get the lyrics of the songs that we really liked. That was how I learned “Hotel California” by The Eagles, my son, however, learned it by playing it almost a dozen times on Guitar Hero.
Although he may think of this music as “old people music” some day, I am hoping that he remembers the old days, when he was a kid and actually liked Papa’s music.
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