“Don’t you think she plays this a little too much?“
– My Ex-Wife upon coming over to my house to find our five-year-old daughter playing Guitar Hero
Now, just for a little clarifiation: It’s not that she was playing Guitar Hero that prompted this rather insulting accusation – she’s been strapping that little black SG over her shoulder since the day I brought GH1 home oh so long ago – it’s the fact that she was playing it WELL. My daughter is pretty damn good at Guitar Hero. Granted, she’s still relegated to Easy but she’s into the 4th setlist on GH2 and has one song left in the first setlist in GH3. And she’s FIVE.
That said, I guess I can understand where she was coming from – for a kid that young to be as good as she is she must play it constantly, right? Wrong. Once she figured out the mechanics (which consisted of failing a song two or three times then calling it a day) of it she picked it up qick. After failing Shout at the Devil for 6 months straight once she finally beat it she shot through the next 4 songs without failing a single one. She’s just GOOD at it – it just clicked with her. At MOST she’ll play about 3 songs a day if she’s hanging out at my house. So no, Lovely Ex-Wife, she DOESN’T play this a little too much and fuck you for insinuating that I let my Playstation do my job as her Daddy.
Yeah, so THAT wasn’t my point – what I particularly enjoy about her interest in the game isn’t the fact that she’s good at it, it’s what it’s brought out in her. She’s interested in MUSIC now, not just liking a song. She has an appreciation for Boston and Queen and David Bowie. She loves AC/DC almost as much as I do. She hears an insane guitar solo on the radio and hears it independently of the song and is impressed by it. She plays air guitar constantly. We caught a Heart video on TV and she got excited to see a girl rockstar. When she grows up she wants to be a cheerleader, a firefighter and a rockstar. She sings all the time and remembers lyrics quicker than even I do.
Sure I started her on this path and introduced her to the music I appreciate and tried to get her to broaden her horizons outside of the typical mainstream stuff her Mom listens to. And she took to it – she sings along to “Don’t Stop Believin'” and “Back in Black” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and I did all of that without Guitar Hero. But what’s awesome about GH is that it’s what took her from just a fan or a spectator and got it in her head that SHE could do it. Pretty much all of us that read this site wanna be a filmmaker in some capacity and we can all think back to the moment when we realized that this was something that WE could do, too. Guitar Hero did that for my daughter. Guitar Hero made her decide she wanted a real guitar. And when she gets it for her birthday, Guitar Hero is what’s going to have given her the confidence to stick with it – she’s seen what practice can do.
And she’s gonna be a rockstar.