The guitar from Guitar Hero.

PROVIDENCE There’s paint by numbers. Now there’s play by colors.

Guitar Hero and its relatively recent upstart competition Rock Band are all the rage among video gamers. And they’re all the wonder of one Brown professor. Kiri Miller, an assistant professor of music, has been researching the phenomenon for a year. “It was a big risk for a game company to invest in a music-oriented game. It seemed like it could be kind of girly. But Guitar Hero proved so incredibly popular that it seemed ripe for study.”

Miller’s questions abound: Why play a fake guitar when you could play the real thing? Does activating a sound track make you feel like a musician? Is playing programmed music an act of creativity?

Guitar Hero, which came out in 2005 and really took off last year with nearly $1 billion in sales — according to Miller, it is this country’s first “music-oriented video game break-out hit” — simulates the experience of playing a guitar. A person holds a plastic guitar with color-coded buttons on the neck. The guitar is connected to a console, which plays music and projects video, on which the color-coded notes of a selected song move across the screen. You have to hit the appointed notes at the appointed time. If you miss a note, there is a gap in the music.

“It’s not like playing air guitar,” Miller says.

To some, it is a game, where proficiency and points create competition. To others, it’s a social interaction, a shared activity revolving around music.

“They experience it as though they were producing the sound,” Miller says. “And while they know that’s not actually the case, they’re capable of suspending disbelief.”

Think of adolescent and pre-adolescent boys. Now think of everyone else.

“Guitar Hero and Rock Band are marketed to little kids and to grandmas.”

Contrary to popular perception, the Entertainment Software Association reports the average gamer is 35 years old; 46 percent of gamers are female; and 26 percent of those older than 50 play video games.

Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which adds drum simulation to the guitar simulation of Guitar Hero, consciously cater to Baby Boomers.

“They include a lot of songs that have a huge amount of nostalgia value for people who grew up in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. My students who are coming in as freshman this year were born in 1990. They’ve never heard 90 percent of songs on these games,” Miller says.

Most of the 400 gamers Miller has interviewed for her research are college students, and most are male. What Miller is after is how playing the games make them feel.

“Your typical 20-year-old college male, when you ask him how he feels about something, is not going to be that forthcoming about their emotional condition. I usually get it some other way.”

Divide and conquer. Miller presents piecemeal questions: When does the game feel fun? What’s the peak experience with the game? How does the experience of playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band differ from playing other video games?

“I don’t ask people directly ‘What’s your emotional state?’ That usually doesn’t yield good results.”

Kate Reutershan is a senior at Brown, and a research assistant with Miller. She had never played Guitar Hero until this summer when she joined Miller’s research. Now she plays about an hour a day.

“We want to get better so we understand the people who play,” Reutershan says.

“We” includes Miller, who plays with Reutershan in a not-for-public-performance Rock Band band they call Dangeresque.

“I could not have any legitimacy doing this study without playing the game,” Miller says.

Also in the Dangeresque band is Amandeep Gill, a Brown senior, who first played Guitar Hero last December and participated in Miller’s research. Playing music, she says, this is not.

“I think it’s more like playing a game. But you have to have rhythm to play the game.”

The most common question that arises with Guitar Hero and Rock Band is “Is it music?”

Miller interviewed Rob Kay, the creator of Guitar Hero and the lead designer of Rock Band. “He said, `We’re not making a music simulator; we’re making a game that simulates the experience of playing music.”

In Miller’s research she found 68 percent of respondents did not regard playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band as “creative.” This may prompt the thought, “Why don’t these people take up a real instrument?”

“They know it may take three or four months of steady play to get quite good at Guitar Hero. But in three or four months they’d still be playing basic chords on a guitar,” she says.

Miller has found in her interviews that gamers are gaining a greater grasp of the classic rock ’n’ roll canon; they’re sharing a pleasurable activity with each other; and their activity is distinct. It’s not playing music and it’s not simply listening to it. It’s interacting with it.

“You’re doing some other thing. I think it’s a new thing, and a new experience with media.”

Because playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band is not considered playing “real” music, there’s an unwritten rule of relative moderation.

“There can be a sense that if you play too much or you get too good,” Miller says. “You cross the line into being lame.”

brourke@projo.com