For myself, and people I usually play Rock Band alongside, score is a secondary concern. In fact, we don’t really care at all. We just want to have fun pretending to play music we love with fake instruments. This is also the attitude of anyone playing Rock Band at a party casually. They just want to have fun.

Unfortunately, failing a song absolutely kills the mood at a party. If players couldn’t completely fail a song, then the game would be much more friendly for social situations. Just letting the song limp along with some sort of “assisted help” mode once a player screws up bad enough would be a lot better than the usual “well, let’s do something else!” result of people failing at a party.

But would lacking a fail condition make higher-level play worse, assuming that failure-free play wasn’t relegated to being an option or just one mode? I know the feeling of just barely scraping by on a song but succeeding is great, but the awesome feeling of totally nailing a song would still remain.

Perhaps the star system could replace failure to some degree? In single player and band world tour mode, you might have to earn a certain number of stars in a set or on a song to pass, but the game never tells you that you suck so explicitly, just that you need to do better. The feeling of just barely scraping by could still be preserved, since you might’ve just barely gotten three stars, instead of just barely finishing the song.

Hopefully, for the inevitable follow-up to Rock Band, Harmonix addresses these concerns in some capacity. This is one of many design and interface changes that could be made to Rock Band without damaging the core band gameplay, and I feel that the gameplay can indeed rise to new heights if video game-centric design choices like failing a song are revised to fit in with the game’s core, augmenting rather than hampering the enjoyment of the full band experience.