Best Buy Bodhisattva

"Perfection is realized only in the moment.
The past tugs, the future holds.
In the moment, no resistance"
- Anonymous

Best Buy during the holidays is a special kind of hell. Swarms of soccer moms trailing toddlers, looking for the new game of the year. Overweight dads butt-glued into recliners in front of NASA-style walls of aggressive televisions, commenting on the silent football games arrayed before them. Hordes of middle aged couples making dreadfully misguided computer purchases.

But the best part of the Best Buy holiday extravaganza are the demo kids. And it was one of these kids who showed me something I will never see again.

Guitar Hero 3. "Through the Fire and the Flames." Expert.

This is a good year for Demo kids. At our local (meaning a half-hour drive) Best Buy there are several honey-pots distributed. Each is well placed in order to siphon off parental traffic towards easy-to-purchase, high-margin merchandise. Along one aisle, a big screen TV is set in a small 12 by 12 carpet square, with a 5.1 sound system (the rear speakers on mic stands) and a handful of low-to-the-ground "gaming chairs."

In the cabinet under the TV sits an Xbox 360. In the chairs sit - perpetually - three teenage boys, their eyes intent on game-du-jour. This Sunday, it was Halo 3 splitscreen. Nobody was deluding themselves that this was any kind of demo - these kids were settling a score, and they were there for the duration.

At the main entrance, a much larger setup is dedicated to Rock Band. Tellingly, the guitars are both Guitar Hero 2 era wired Explorers, the workhorse standard in the guitar game universe. The drum kit features duct tape in several places. As I walk by, 4 teenage boys are playing "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a choice not only unlikely due to the song's laconic and decidedly non-hardcore tone, but also due to the fact that one of the boys is actually singing, amplified, and doing it quite well. That Rock Band has brought baggy-trousered boys out of their basements to actually sing in public is a testament to the game's power. That my four year old son Jake is also singing every word with perfect diction and not-half-bad tone is a testament to how many hours I've played it, not any expression of talent on his part.

And then there's the Guitar Hero setup. Let's face it, if there was a battle going on between Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3, GH3 not only lost, it packed up its marbles and went home. An entertaining extension of the franchise to be sure, it is been relegated to a mid-aisle station in the PC gaming ghetto, not even worthy of console-land real estate. The Xbox 360 is perched atop the shelves connected to a paltry 20-something standard-definition screen. One heavily abused wired Gibson guitar hangs by its strap, calling out to me even though I know I have the game at home, can't play anything particularly impressive, and have no time to waste as we press through the herd.

As I stare wistfully down the PC game aisle, the posse approaches. Four teenage boys (it always seems to be boys), not so much walking, but dancing, like poised ballerinas. Their torsos are almost entirely motionless as their legs slide along the floor. Their pants are ridiculous: large enough for two and beltless, each clearly a plumber's apprentice. They wear unmatching zip hoodies. The tallest of the boys is perhaps 6 feet. His skin is pasty white and pimpled, with what might pass for baby-soft stubble. His hair is a mass of center-parted brown grease. I feel a deep sympathy for him.

As one and with purpose, they stop in front of the GH3 shrine. Choreographed in their movements, the smallest of the clan hands the well-used Gibson Les Paul reverently to the leader.

"OK Kyle, here you go."

Kyle takes the guitar from him. Jake is getting antsy.

"Ratatouille! Daddy we haven't even seen Ratatouille!"

I lose my focus on Kyle as I negotiate the non-purchase of Pixar's ratmovie. Uncurling from the bent over toddler-discussion Yoga pose, I see Kyle move through the selection screens, and my heart jumps to my throat.

"Through the Fire and the Flames" on Expert.

The inclusion of Fire and the Flames in Guitar Hero 3 always struck me as something of a cruel joke. Upon beating the game, Fire and the Flames plays as the credits roll. It plays in a kind of practice mode, so that you have the opportunity to flail on the ridiculous note chart. The song itself is classic hair-guitar, and while watching the original guitarist play it is a jaw dropping "holy-Jesus-on-a-popsicle-stick" experience, as music goes it's not the kind of thing I put on my iPod for casual listening. It exists purely as an expression of guitar hubris.

As the stage swirls on the screen, a calm comes over Kyle. His face slackens a bit. He closes his eyes. His lieutenants absorb his tension, shuffling their feet, biting their nails. The highway of the fret board starts rolling, and as the first note falls, Kyle's eyes open.

The entire intro of Fire is hammer-ons. There's no preamble. There's no warm up. It starts hard and it stays hard. Both of Kyle's hands are poised over the fret buttons as he taps out the notes. He is not looking at the screen. He is looking at his fingers. His long neck and arms make the guitar controller look even more diminutive than it is. He is curled over it, completely motionless but for his fingers. I look at the screen as he passes "200 note streak."

The second half of the intro starts at about 30 seconds in and moves from hammer-ons to a rapidfire staccato. I've seen this on YouTube ego-clips, so I'm expecting the sharp jackhammer of the strum bar as he approaches what must be 20 notes per second. But instead of loud and frantic flailing, his face slackens, his lips parting slightly, and he is nearly silent. Instead of slamming the strumbar with mechanical arrogance, he holds it between two fingers as if plucking petals off a rose, each stroke a delicate whisper.

300 note streak.
400 note streak.
500 note streak.

At about one minute in there is a pause, perhaps five seconds where the band's singer mumbles some 1980's era lyrics into a microphone. I've never particularly cared what he had to say. Kyle is absolutely motionless. There's no shaking out of hands, no turning to make knowing glances at his audience or worry about his hair.

He blinks.

The song enters another manic section. Occasionally he shifts his right hand up from the strum bar to tap out a hammer-on section. His face continues to soften. He has lost at least an inch of height as his spine and knees succumb to gravity. A minute and a half into the song, I see him falter, missing a note for the first time and resetting his multiplier to zero. It's not clear that Kyle has noticed. The shortest of his kinsmen, the one who had so reverently handed him the guitar, sends a glance my way, then down towards my knees to the eyes of my 4 year old. I bend over and pick him up.

"Can we go?" Jake asks.

A reasonable question for which there is no reasonable answer. "Just a minute, I need to see this." I point at the screen.

3, 4, 5 minutes into the song. Kyle slips deeper into what is clearly a state of Samadhi; He no longer perceives a space between himself and the game. There is no him. There is no song. There is no guitar.

At 6 minutes in, a small crowd has formed, perhaps 15 of us. His sravaka - his disciples - look nervously at us, absorbing the distractions, protecting him a bubble of calm. There is complete silence. Even my son is staring slackjawed, like he does in church during communion, not understanding the content of the ritual but understanding the tone and sacredness of the space.

At just over 6 minutes, the song becomes even more ludicrous. While actually playing it will ever remain for me an uncrossable gap, I am enough a student of the form to recognize the crux. He is Lance Armstrong approaching the bottom of Alpe D'Huez: Will he attack? Kyle has yet to use the Star Power crutch he has carried throughout his meditation.

He continues to ignore it.

His posse is immobile now: brows furrowed in tension, fingers white and digging into palms. I realize I haven't blinked in too long and force myself. My palms are sweating, my left hand cramped in sympathy. As the song comes to it's unrelenting conclusion, I can only stare at Kyle's face. His eyelids have dropped, half covering his irises.

He hits the last orange note. He lets the guitar fall from his hands onto the floor. It's not an act of disdain or bravado, his hands simply open and then there is no guitar. I look at the screen. "You Rock!" Jake echoes with the screen. 500,000 points. Kyle isn't looking. The small crowd claps for a second, then starts to disperse.

I try to catch his eyes, to make some feeble 40-year-old-dad gesture: maybe a nod, or a humble utterance of "nice." But, his sutra complete, his eyes have gone to his shoes. His companions pat him on the back, not with a juvenile high-five, but with an almost loving touch, they way you'd touch an aging parent on the back when asking if they're pneumonia was getting better. They turn away from us and walk back down the aisle in the direction they had come.

Jake squirms. I put him down and take his hand.

It's warm and soft and surprisingly strong as he squeezes mine. As we walk out of the store, I have the odd sense of being aware of my breathing. For a moment at least, it becomes a conscious act.

Comments

bler wrote:

***

kettle calling the pot black, I bet.

Penny Arcade wrote:

Invariably, when reasonable people are discussing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, that forum smart guy oozes in somewhere near the middle of the thread and tells people that they should be playing real instruments - presumably, like he does. Put aside that Mozart has missed the point completely (i.e., why don't you play for the real NFL, etc). The fact of the matter is that he is quite simply wrong. And not just wrong: it's that thick, unctuous kind of wrong that masquerades as erudition. He is, in fact, a yokel - and he's operating under some pretty romantic notions of what constitutes an "instrument."

I wrote about this a while ago when talking about the remix mode of Frequency, another Harmonix game, and how it made the PS2 controller a kind of instrument. That idea fascinated me. Actual instruments are not especially ergonomic, in general terms - they are not engineered for use. They need to account for crass physical laws to epitomize their function. Instruments are beautiful, let me be clear. But they are not, themselves, music.

These guitars are only toys because they are limited, at this particular moment, to playing other people's songs. This is a software problem, and not representative of some lasting defect with the device. It's already been resolved by the community many times over. When Harmonix delivers a composition suite with the next Rock Band (or the next), and people start creating and uploading their own albums, it's going to be pretty hard to maintain the fiction that people are playing with toys. Between the five keys, combinations of those keys, and the "hammer on, pull off" mechanic, you're talking about a ri-goddamn-diculous number of states - even before you expand it with pass-thru USB style devices that intermediate between the guitar and the host device.

bler wrote:

***

You do relize your posting on a thread in the Gamers with Jobs web site, right?

[mod edit] Issue taken care of.

I think most people call it muscle memory.

Your absolutely right and if my brain could have remembered the exact term at 3 am I probably would have used it instead.

Golly I take a lunch break and all hell, well, I guess I'll never know.

As for the "state" 1DGaf - I've certainly felt that sense of being "in the zone" where everything gets out of the way. But it certainly wasn't when I was 16, and it certainly wasn't with the unassuming, non-douchebag quality that Kyle had. The experience wasn't one of "gee he's great," it was one of "gee, he's great, and it totally doesn't matter."

1Dgaf wrote:

As gamers, through repetition and familiarity, we all have those moments when our muscle memory kicks in and we no longer think about what we're doing.

This is extremely true. I've had moments in racing games where I finish a race and can't remember the last two laps. It used to happen a lot in really fast matches of Halo 2 as well. Slower paced games I tend to do a lot of actual thinking, but any game that moves quickly really turns to just instinct and I'm pretty zoned out for most of it.

This is why I'm so quiet on voicechat when I'm doing extremely well in a game. If I'm doing awful or just ok I can occasionally manage a few words, but if I'm really kicking ass in a fast paced game it means I'm probably so zoned out I'm not hearing anybody else anyway.

rabbit wrote:

The experience wasn't one of "gee he's great," it was one of "gee, he's great, and it totally doesn't matter."

rabbit's got a man crush.

I love the comparison of the song to communion.
Awesome piece.

Wow. Even reading this brings back fond memories of Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast. Where your hands aren't moving. Your brain just make the characters move and attack and block. It's just second nature.

Very well done. HOORAH!

Impressive piece, rabbit! Had me hooked from title to end.

Beautiful, elevated my heart rate through the simple act of reading! (And the not as simple act of writing methinks..)

That and I learned what I should use for my Nike+Ipod power song for my next run...

This is really well written and puts the reader into your shoes.

Rabbit,

Never when you were 16? Weren't the games you played ones that let you get in the zone? When I was 16 I played SNES platformers until the early morning and, because of tiredness, lost myself to the game easily. Those are the times when I've played my best.

What Kyle did certainly sounds remarkable and he should be applauded for it. However his demeanour should be the rule -- if we should never be applaud teens for being unnassuming. Anyway, if he'd had shown off it would have been wholly inappropiate. He played a rhythm game in a shop, not saved a man's life by gerryrigging a defibrillator using a DVD player and portable stereo.

(I wonder what they were all doing there in that group. Is BestBuy like a mall? A place where teenagers congregate in hopes of congregating?)

I do that a lot when I play games like Guitar Hero or DJ Max Portable. It gets to a point where my body takes over and does it all for me.

What's funny is when I realize that I'm on auto-pilot, I can still hit the notes while thinking to myself "How the hell am I doing this?!"

1Dgaf wrote:

Rabbit,

Never when you were 16? Weren't the games you played ones that let you get in the zone? When I was 16 I played SNES platformers until the early morning and, because of tiredness, lost myself to the game easily. Those are the times when I've played my best.

What Kyle did certainly sounds remarkable and he should be applauded for it. However his demeanour should be the rule -- if we should never be applaud teens for being unnassuming. Anyway, if he'd had shown off it would have been wholly inappropiate. He played a rhythm game in a shop, not saved a man's life by gerryrigging a defibrillator using a DVD player and portable stereo.

(I wonder what they were all doing there in that group. Is BestBuy like a mall? A place where teenagers congregate in hopes of congregating?)

I know in highschool I skipped class one time with some buddies to play GH2 at the local BestBuy.

So 1dgaf, dude, i'm with you. Maybe it's a generational thing, i dunno. When I turned 16, we we're just heading into the great early 1980's videogame crash. The NES was still years away, much less the SNES. But regardless, and obviously I've failed at conveying this, the point isn't "this kid is amazing." I've seen dozens of kids full of piss and pomp who could kick my ass at any game ever made. The amazing thing about this experience, which I guess falls under an apparent veil of unintentional hyperbole, is that this kid, and perhaps more importantly the kids around him, didn't actually seem to care, or even to have the "I don't care" attitude. Kyle exuded not a whit of alpha male, other than perhaps his height. My read wasn't that he came to Best Buy to show off what he'd learned at home. My read was that he simply couldn't pass by and NOT do it, for his own reasons, for the same reasons i can't actually walk past Trinity Church on Wall Street without going in.

I can't really expect anyone to believe me - it's just my perception of 8 minutes in a busy mall (where, yes, its a congregation. You don't know impromptu socialzing until you've been to a mall DEEP in the countryside.) I understand "the zone." I've felt it (usually on a bicycle, not on a couch) and I've seen it (ditto, see Lance Armstrong).

This was something way, way beyond that.

Sorry, don't mean to get defensive. I struggled with how to convey this for days after I witnessed it, knew I'd fail, and gave it my best shot. Honestly, the whole time I was sitting there, I had the thought in my head that nobody would believe me. Except Bill Harris, and I dropped him a note about it. But I felt like I had to do more than give him an email. I mean, he's like a freak or something.

Rabbit,

You're not defensive, you're explaining yourself.

The difference in my gaming experiences and yours must indeed be our ages. I actually asked my question about what you played in case you were into text adventures and so on. I imagine one loses onself in a text game, whereas one loses oneself to a twitch game.

It's clear that the child was deep in thought, perhaps beyond thought. (Where we consider thought to be alternatively tangential and pensive.) THat and his skills were the things I took from your article. His demeanour immediately afterwards was something that added to the story but didn't seem as intrinsic a part of it. However, if he had stepped away from the game and started braying, then it would have been incongruous with the state he was in while playing the game. (I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers!".) In that sense, everything makes sense.

Where I do think you got things wrong - and this is nothing to do with the article, which is excellent - is that Kyle wasn't just 'passing by'. From the way you describe them, it sounds like they came to BestBuy with the sole purpose of playing Guitar Hero. (If they were demo pod tourists, other, shinier things would have got their attention.) For Kyle it was something enjoyable to do. For his friends it was a way to pass the time, to take pleasure in a friend's skills and, in being his friend, share some small measure of his success.

I am not ashamed to admit that my eyes were misty by the time I finished reading.

You should stop smoking.

I'll be here all week!

1Dgaf wrote:

I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers!

I need to sleep on it, but that may be my new sig.

I used to be able to enter that "zen" state on a fair number of games in my high school and especially college days (in particular was Goldeneye deathmatch, my friends loved to watch when I entered "the zone" and I was able to take in all four screens at once, dancing through the maps like a ballerina marksman, efficiently snapping off headshots on them as I whipped around corners and then was just gone before they could pin me down; probably the only real competitive game I ever felt that I had truly become a master of), but anymore it's rare to find a game I can do this with. The Guitar Hero games have had a few songs that do it to me, F-Zero GX did as well. I can't think of any other recent examples.

rabbit wrote:

So 1dgaf, dude, i'm with you. Maybe it's a generational thing, i dunno. When I turned 16, we we're just heading into the great early 1980's videogame crash. The NES was still years away, much less the SNES. But regardless, and obviously I've failed at conveying this, the point isn't "this kid is amazing." I've seen dozens of kids full of piss and pomp who could kick my ass at any game ever made. The amazing thing about this experience, which I guess falls under an apparent veil of unintentional hyperbole, is that this kid, and perhaps more importantly the kids around him, didn't actually seem to care, or even to have the "I don't care" attitude. Kyle exuded not a whit of alpha male, other than perhaps his height. My read wasn't that he came to Best Buy to show off what he'd learned at home. My read was that he simply couldn't pass by and NOT do it, for his own reasons, for the same reasons i can't actually walk past Trinity Church on Wall Street without going in.

I can't really expect anyone to believe me - it's just my perception of 8 minutes in a busy mall (where, yes, its a congregation. You don't know impromptu socialzing until you've been to a mall DEEP in the countryside.) I understand "the zone." I've felt it (usually on a bicycle, not on a couch) and I've seen it (ditto, see Lance Armstrong).

This was something way, way beyond that.

Sorry, don't mean to get defensive. I struggled with how to convey this for days after I witnessed it, knew I'd fail, and gave it my best shot. Honestly, the whole time I was sitting there, I had the thought in my head that nobody would believe me. Except Bill Harris, and I dropped him a note about it. But I felt like I had to do more than give him an email. I mean, he's like a freak or something.

Weird, that's exactly the impression I got when I first read the piece.

You either missed my question due to the page jump or ignored it - have you ever thought of kerouacing these works into a novel? Some kind of gamer life wisdom? We've got our Lester Bangs and our Dylan, why not a Hemingway?

I consider much of what is written here in lines with gaming literature of important. Perhaps literature first and the topic is about gaming. I've been nothing but impressed with the writing on Front Page articles since I started reading before I joined. It's awesome in caliber and I can only hope to continue reading them for many years to come.

rabbit wrote:
1Dgaf wrote:

I don't imagine master craftsmen leaping away from completed projects and shouting "Done, motherf*ckers!

I need to sleep on it, but that may be my new sig.

If you don't take it I'm going to.

I'm tempted to yell that everytime I finish anything for the rest of my life.

The next game of CoD4 I finish will end with a loud pronouncement that I am indeed done and that the other players are, in fact, motherf*ckers.

Thanks for the aggressive salad tossing all, I'll go make some dressing for you (grin).

And Souldaddy, when I first showed up around here I tried to get Lobo and Lara to write a book, but then they effectively evaporated. But I'm glad someone else on the planet considers N'Gai Croal's existence as proof that Klosterman was a Farktard for suggesting we needed a Bangs.

Wow. That sentence has so much inside baseball it's practically in code.

rabbit wrote:

Thanks for the aggressive salad tossing all, I'll go make some dressing for you (grin).

And Souldaddy, when I first showed up around here I tried to get Lobo and Lara to write a book, but then they effectively evaporated. But I'm glad someone else on the planet considers N'Gai Croal's existence as proof that Klosterman was a Farktard for suggesting we needed a Bangs.

Wow. That sentence has so much inside baseball it's practically in code.

It hurts my brains.

rabbit wrote:

Wow. That sentence has so much inside baseball it's practically in code.

Nothing "practically" about it!

rabbit wrote:

Thanks for the aggressive salad tossing all, I'll go make some dressing for you (grin).

And Souldaddy, when I first showed up around here I tried to get Lobo and Lara to write a book, but then they effectively evaporated. But I'm glad someone else on the planet considers N'Gai Croal's existence as proof that Klosterman was a Farktard for suggesting we needed a Bangs.

Wow. That sentence has so much inside baseball it's practically in code.

In code is an understatement. All I need is a feaking cryptex from Dan Brown to begin to understand it.

Mystic Violet wrote:

What's funny is when I realize that I'm on auto-pilot, I can still hit the notes while thinking to myself "How the hell am I doing this?!"

Heh, yeah, my wife was just talking about hitting that zone in Rock Band recently. She was like, "every once in a while I get into the groove and think I'm just getting along alright, and I look down after a difficult part and go, 'Whoa, how do I have 4x!?'"

=)

I'm totally digging watching her wail on the drums.

Great Read. Thank you. It brings back some memories of my philosophical readings and the 'zen' of the moment in sports and games.