Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Bridging The Gap

Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix, answered questions for the NYT Freakonomics blog this week. The full interview is here, but here's an excerpt:
Q: How important is it to make the instruments closer to the real thing, and how do you prevent the complexities of realism from getting in the way of fun?
A: Authenticity of the musical experience was one of the key design goals in Rock Band, and I do think that during the coming years we will continue to try to bridge the gap between simulated musicianship and real musicianship. That said, the path there is not obvious: As the interactivity moves closer to real instrumental performance, the complexity/difficulty explodes rapidly. The challenge is to move along this axis in sufficiently tiny increments, so that the experience remains accessible and compelling for many millions of people.

If anyone can bridge that gap, It's these guys.

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