Why I've given up speedrunning (ALL MY OPINON) (Off-Topic)

by kanbo , Seattle, WA, Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 21:04 (3937 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I have some friends that are kind of going through a similar situation.

When Guitar Hero was young, the three of us got really into it. I think we were in 8th grade at the time, so just the idea of playing a guitar was a big deal for us. I enjoyed the game, but didn't treat it like a competition the same way they did. For the next 6 or 7 years, they poured countless hours into Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Buying all of the DLC, joining online score communities, modding their Playstations to add custom-charted songs, going to events, building bands at PAX from other online players so they could just kill in the competitions. One of the guys was, arguably, the best GH/RB guitar player in the state for a number of years, and their RB band stomped everyone else every year they competed at PAX and Sakuracon.

I generally liked playing with them, but I could only do so much at once because of the difference in the way they approached it. They couldn't separate themselves from that competition mindset; the constant need to play to get the most points programmatically possible instead of just playing to play. There were certain songs I never got to play with them because they were too easy on the hardest difficulties or because they knew they couldn't possibly get a higher score.

Eventually, they started to tone it down and we could play a lot more casually. Just a couple of songs, screwing around, whatever. I don't know if it's necessarily because they realized it was more fun this way, or because the music game fad started to die, but it became way more enjoyable once they stepped out of the meta game and took the game at face value.

Another thing I learned was that the Guitar Hero and Rock Band communities were mostly garbage.