Playing Along by Miller Kiri

Author:Miller, Kiri
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

A NIGHT WITH THE ROCK-ORIENTED: FOUR-PLAYER KARAOKE?

When I arrived at Our House East, a college-crowd Boston bar near Northeastern University, I found Mike Dadmun, the guy who ran the weekly Rock Band game night, standing out front tapping away at his cell phone—texting me, as it turned out. I recognized him from his Facebook profile photo and introduced myself. (I’d found him through a Rock Band group on Facebook and had messaged him to arrange an interview.) We went inside, where he had set up the Rock Band instrument controllers facing a large wall-mounted TV. It was only 5:30, and the college students were gone for the summer; the small bar was almost empty. The setup in the bar wasn’t quite what I had expected. I had assumed the players would face an audience, as at a karaoke night—perhaps even standing on some kind of stage, with a projector screen across the room so that they could read the game’s musical notation. Instead, the instruments were only a few feet from the TV; the players would have to look in that direction, with their backs to the rest of the bar.

Mike offered me a homemade brownie from a Tupperware container and insisted on buying me a beer. He was a super-friendly guy, and I could immediately see why he’d been hired to run an event that required people to volunteer to perform in front of strangers (see Figure 4.2). As people began to trickle into the bar, Mike seemed to know almost everyone. He told me that a core group of regulars had been coming to various Rock Band bar nights around town several times a week for months on end. The bars paid Mike and his employer, Shaun Scovil, to bring in the game equipment and host these events, which attracted customers on slow nights of the week. In the summer of 2009 their two-person company was running eight weekly Rock Band events around Boston. Similar bar events had become popular around the country in the wake of Guitar Hero II’s commercial success; a 2007 New York Times feature dubbed Guitar Hero night “the new karaoke night—without the embarrassment of atrocious vocals” (Zezima 2007). When Rock Band was released later that year, karaoke vocals became an option at game nights, though most participants still preferred to play instruments.

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