Rock Band’s uncanny valley

The “uncanny valley” is a term that comes from a theory that states that as artificial entities become more and more lifelike, there comes a point at which the human mind begins to have an adverse reaction to the entity. The adverse reaction ceases once the entity has reached an even more lifelike state. The range of “lifelike-ness” values that incite this kind of adverse reaction is known as the uncanny valley. The term is most often encountered in topics regarding robots, but it has more recently been used to describe some videogame characters that have, because of advances in graphics technology, become realistic to the point of “creepiness”.

Now, enter the true subject of this discussion – Rock Band. Rock Band was my most anticipated game of the year. I pre-ordered it and played it for hours when it arrived at my doorstep on the 21st of November. I’ve since rotated through every instrument. I’ve completed the vocal and drum solo tours on hard. I’m four songs away from completing the guitar tour on expert. My wife and I have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Nuggets are legends. But after all of the fame and glory, there was still something crucial missing from that rock and roll high (except for, you know, the real fans). The experience was a bad addiction – the kind that left you wanting more and more until you finally started getting disgusted with yourself. After puzzling about it for days, I’ve finally arrived at the conclusion that my Rock Band experience is most appropriately described as an uncanny valley.

Rock Band is the logical evolution of Guitar Hero, Harmonix’s previous rhythm franchise. It purports to offer the complete band experience. I dove into the game looking for the absolute best the rhythm game genre had to offer. I certainly can’t say I was let down. But there was something… off… about it all. Each time I held one of those substantial instruments in my eager hands, I was expecting to become a rock star. I expected to be whisked away to a world where my skills, creativity, and showmanship truly made me the center of attention. After all, I was using a real microphone, and I’ve heard that the game’s drum kit can come awfully close to mimicking the real thing. Faulty equipment issues aside, each instrument does do an amazing job of conveying that elusive feeling of accomplishment that drives a musician to improve and perfect his or her craft. Rock Band simply distills the experience and dumps it all on you faster than you can go and schedule a real instrument lesson. The years of lessons and experimentation are replaced by minutes (or, in the extreme cases, hours) of intense practice, progressively ascending the difficulty ladder in true Harmonix fashion. Skip the years of obscurity and bam – there you are, in front of a crowd of sorts, playing your heart out. Just because it isn’t real doesn’t mean it can’t feel real. (After all, abstracted simulations make up a good percentage of games on the market, anyway.) But time after time, as I began losing myself amidst the cheers and the sound of the crowd singing along in unquenched fanaticism – just as I was approaching that coveted rock and roll nirvana – something “repulsive” would rear its head and immediately send me plummeting back to earth. The repulsion is not so much caused by a glaring problem as much as it is caused by a glaring failure to be that perfect simulation one might hope for – not unlike the android with the indistinguishable human countenance whose blank stare and monotonous voice make it abundantly (and frighteningly) clear it is not alive.

The Stratocaster controller is an awesome piece of equipment, functionally superior to the Guitar Hero II/III controllers and overflowing with potential. The newly designed fret buttons are colored on the side, making the color correspondence easily visible. They are also designed to take up the entire width of the neck and sit almost immediately adjacent to each other, much like real frets. This allows me to slide up and down the fretboard much like I would on a real guitar. The strumbar no longer clicks annoyingly like it used to, making strums feel much more natural. Upstrums suddenly became much more approachable because of this. The guitar even has an effects selector (though using it is admittedly much more jarring than using a real effects pedal, not to mention real guitars use that same selector for selecting pickups and not effects). And then there are the solo buttons – another set of five buttons further up the neck that can be tapped during solo sections. The guitar is a darn respectable piece of plastic – so it came as no surprise to me when I started wanting the thing to be real. But there were problems. The note charts never really felt quite right. Some of those pentatonic riffs didn’t really require hammering-on three notes in a row. I knew I could nail some of those licks on a real guitar without half of the fumbling. It also took me the longest time to discover why hammer-ons and pull-offs felt so… wrong. But I did find the reason: in Rock Band (and Guitar Hero I/II before it), you cannot continue hammering-on or pulling-off if you mistime one of the notes in the middle of the hammer-on / pull-off series – instead, you’re forced to strum after a missed note to get the next note to register. That’s just not how it works on a real guitar. Say you have tablature that has the hammer-on series 1h3h5. On a real guitar, mistiming the h3 doesn’t suddenly mean you can’t hammer-on for the h5. In Rock Band (and Guitar Hero before it), a mistimed h3 turns 1h3h5 into a forced 1h3-5 – very different things at fast tempos. Add even more notes to the hammer-on / pull-off series, and what should have been one botched note becomes an entire botched series if the player tries to shrug it off like a real guitarast would. Along with these nitpicky details, other questions come to mind as I’m struggling to rock out: Why aren’t there open notes? Why can’t I bend strings? Where are the “freeform” solos? What about palm mutes, pick scrapes, and squealin’ pinch harmonics? Obviously, most of these capabilities are far beyond the scope of an affordable digital instrument made of plastic, but when you’re two moments of narcissistic showmanship away from being the next big thing, you can’t help but wonder about the things you could be doing to drive the crowd (and the couch-bound onlookers) wild.

The microphone, another of Rock Band’s instruments, actually closes the gap between simulation and reality. The mic is, in fact, a real, working mic. Players really do sing into it as opposed to simulating the act of singing. So where’s the uncanny valley here? There can’t be an uncanny valley if nothing is being emulated, right? Then why is it that I begin to tremble at the sight of my third or fourth consecutive “Messy” when I know I’ve got the vocals down? I swear it isn’t my voice (except, maybe, during the week that I got a nasty throat bug) – after all, I practically get an hour’s worth of vocal practice every day (you know… in the car during my daily commute, of course). The problem is in the software’s interpretation of “accurate” vocals. The rock genre is littered with a wide variety of vocal stylings, and to capture the nuances of each vocal track in every song and enforce them can become a technical nightmare. Instead, it appears that Rock Band’s technology rewards the singers that can most precisely maintain a note at its textbook frequency for its entire duration. In other words, hard and expert modes were much easier when I sang like a robot. To be fair, though, the problem most often reared its head in songs with rapid-fire lyrics or with half-talkie vocals (David Bowie, ‘m’i'rite?). But in most cases, you can just straight out forget about deep vibrato. And then embellishment? Style? Harmony? Improvisation? Passion? Forget about it. Leave that crap to the losers stuck on medium difficulty. Amateurs.

The drums are the last (and my favorite) instrument of the Rock Band bunch. The drum kit is another impressive piece of hardware, equipped with four pads and a bass drum pedal. It even comes with a real pair of wooden Ludwig drumsticks. One could easily imagine turning the thing into a rudimentary programmable electronic drum kit. Furthermore, the integration with the gameplay is magnificent – as players climb the difficulty ladder, they come closer and closer to (in most cases) one-to-one note correspondence with the actual percussion track. It is clear that Harmonix put extra effort into making the drum note tables as realistic as possible. It wasn’t long before I found myself air-drumming everywhere I went. This wasn’t especially ideal during my daily commute, as the gas pedal does not make a good (and by “good”, I mean “safe”) bass pedal. Anyway, as I began tackling expert-mode songs, I even found myself looking for drumming tips through online resources intended for real drummers. My ghetto interpretation of the heel-toe technique has already saved me on several occasions. On top of all of this, I found the most potentially fulfilling part to be the drum fills. In Rock Band, drummers with enough energy in their meters can execute a freestyle drum fill during designated parts of the song. Ending the drum fill with a well-timed crash (preferably accompanied by a simultaneous bass drum hit, or so a good drummer friend of mine once mentioned in passing) will put the drummer into overdrive. However, this brilliant mechanic has been both a source of pain and pleasure, as several people claim that there are technical limitations that may make real-time audio feedback impossible for those with certain audio systems. Even after calibration, the audio feedback from my fills still lag by a fraction of a beat. I eventually learned to switch my aural attention during drum fills from the audio output to the actual beating of my sticks on the pads, but I still often find myself frustrated after having to compensate for the lag. It’s a shame, because after playing the Rock Band drums long enough, I can easily envision myself behind a real drum set, entirely engrossed in the experience. The rubber pads transform into snare drums, hi-hats, toms, and cymbals, the lifeless thunks slowly bleeding away into a reverberating percussive symphony. My head bobs, and my arms rise and fall with confidence and precision. I hardly need look at the screen anymore – the beat is inside of me. But then my moment comes, and my meticulously planned and carefully executed fill brings an abrupt end to the immersion, as my masterpiece becomes little more than a 200 ms stutter.

Throughout these various experiences, the tug-of-war between dream and reality was somewhere between disappointing and disgusting. I wanted to be the one on center stage. I wanted to be the one in possession of that secret concoction of craft and creativity. But it was overwhelmingly clear that I was a long way from stardom. It was not me in that limelight. Ultimately, I was still stepping into someone else’s shoes. Ultimately, I was still just pretending. That was and is the harsh reality, but with some mental effort, I was able to climb out of that crevasse, doing away with those petty notions of “simulation”, in which the uncanny valley resides. I was able to enjoy the game exactly for what it was – a game.

But put me in front some real drums and I swear I can rock your face off…