I just wanna bang on the drum all day

So the hot thing in libraries is gaming, right? Sure, cool. Only, since I am the uncoolest librarian ever to walk the planet I do not game. I have never owned a gaming system. In high school I played Doom II on the family PC and enjoyed the occasional game of Quake in college, but it never became something I found wholly fascinating. I support those who want to game in libraries, and gaming collection development, but don't ask me to build your game collection for you. I'm much better with books.

My husband had a birthday this week and received a nice sum of money from his parents and a Best Buy gift card from mine, so he bought himself a Playstation 3. While he was shopping, I wandered the DVD aisles (so. much. temptation!) and then the gaming equipment. I saw two guys playing Rock Band with a set of 4 drum pads.

"Hey," I thought to myself, "I played drums for 12 years. I should be pretty good at this game!" So after the guys were done playing, I picked up the sticks. I set the level to Easy (first mistake) and picked a song I knew (second mistake) and started.

Logic would dictate that in order to do well in the game, you should approximate the drum patterns as close as possible. Maybe it was because I picked Easy level, but that is NOT how it works. More than once as I played through I heard my husband say, "Carlie, you're not playing what's on the screen, you're playing with the music." Well of COURSE I'm playing with the music! Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?

Apparently not. What you're supposed to play is more a simplified version of the actual percussion part. Problem: I picked a song to which I knew the percussion part very well, complications and all, and I had a hard time resisting the urge to play the complicated part. I also had a hard time resisting the urge to hit the drum pads in front of me and not the cymbals that I knew should exist. It was fun, but kind of frustrating. That, and a couple of teenage boys were watching me. They were very sweet and helpful, though, and I'm sure they got the laugh of their lives watching me attempt to play.

I might go back sometime and set the music to the Medium or Hard level, just to see if that makes the music any easier to play. But in the meantime, I'm haranguing my husband to buy me Guitar Hero. At least I won't have any habits to unlearn.