Earthling

First, let me set the stage. You walk up a set of short stairs into a futuristic but plain white room, and someone hands you a microphone connected to a console via USB, and cues up one of those songs that everyone likes. Even if you're resistant to singing as you walk up the stairs, somehow once you have the mic in your hand you're ready. The mic causes some sort of transformation. I saw it happen several times at the E3 demo booth, and I've seen it happen in private Karaoke rooms as well.

SingStar Victims

It helps that they have a staff of fun people ready to perform a duet with you, and drown your horrible singing with theirs. It was a blast to be in that little room watching people sing their hearts out. And Mason clearly enjoyed it too. When I asked him what has been most rewarding about his experience designing the game, he said that he loves seeing people interacting with it in person, and watching them "get" the idea right away.

So SingStar is a Karaoke game that helps you along by showing on-screen in loose musical notation what notes you should be singing, and how far off you are. It's been around for a while in Europe, and is coming to the U.S. both for the Playstation 2 and as a title for the Playstation 3 when it launches. Mason explained that in Europe, SingStar has transcended the hard-core gamer audience and is something that families and groups of friends get together to do. He said he's gotten his grandmother to sing. She mainly sticks to Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley tracks.

Mason has been working on SingStar since the prototype stage back in 2001. I asked him what he's done with the game to make it as easy as possible for people of all experience and interest levels to adopt. He mentioned that one of the barriers to getting more people into console games is the traditional controller. It can be very intimidating to pick up if you've never had to deal with something with multiple buttons, sticks, and pads. The gaming industry seems to be on top of this, and at E3 this year there were a ton of non-traditional controllers on display, including Sony's announcement that the Playstation 3 will have motion-sensitive controllers. The success of Dance Dance Revolution internationally must have been part of what paved the way for that boom.

Everyone knows how to use a microphone. Once you have it in your hand and there's a song playing, you *know* what to do even if you don't necessarily have the million dollar pipes to do it. If one person is willing to pick up the regular controller long enough to set the game up and pick the songs, no one else in a SingStar party ever has to touch it.

Mason also said he concentrated on making the interface and menus as straightforward as possible, so that anyone new to the video game console world wouldn't be intimidated.

There's a lot more to SingStar, including hooks in to an online world of sharing and discovery that has some similarities to the better parts of YouTube and MySpace. And they plan to regularly release song collections that will pull in the interests of different kinds of music fans. My parents said that when there's a showtunes collection for SingStar, then they'll start to be interested.

Karaoke has become something of a known commodity in the U.S., and is one of the few activities that can transcend age to a large extent. I don't know how many people have bought standalone karaoke players in the U.S. To me, that seems like a weird single-purpose appliance to have. I don't think many of my friends have them -- any time someone wants to have a karaoke party we end up in a discussion about whether to try to rent a machine or go to a karaoke bar. It would be great to have a system that was great for karaoke but had other uses too. And the SingStar hardware and software seemed to me to be a vast improvement over the aging systems you'll find in most karaoke bars. If it allows online features and the ability to sing and share remotely, that will make it easier to scratch the karaoke itch even if you can't find a group of friends willing to participate.

One of the questions I'm asking myself at E3 is whether we'll start to see regular people in the U.S. doing strange things in their living room, like waving a controller around in the air to play a game, using an actual quiz show controller to play a quiz game, or singing into a microphone. I'm starting to see how those activities could soon become more and more common.