See, for me it’s like the experience of playing the guitar: you have to do two things at the same time (fret a note and strum it; raise the foot and hit the hi-hat). It’s a challenge of, well, coordinating.
Guitar Hero tries to capture the physicality of the guitar experience in that specific case (requiring simultaneous action), but Rock Band doesn’t try to capture the physicality of the open-hi-hat experience because it exceeds the capabilities of their input controls. I agree with you on that. But as far as I can see your claim here is that it feels wrong compared to the real thing – that is, it’s not realistic enough.
To me it is unrealistic in pretty much exactly the same way Guitar Hero is unrealistic. Playing GH is nothing like playing the guitar in practice (many things that are hard in Guitar Hero put the difficulty on the left hand where in the actual guitar part the left hand barely moves and the right hand has to do a complicated cross-string picking patterns). But I find the mental experience in the zone feels a lot like the mental experience of being in the zone playing a real guitar.
To me, this unrealism isn’t game-y, it’s just unrealism brought about by the limited input controls, and that’s just fine by me. It makes me feel like I’m playing on an instrument that could plausibly be producing the sounds I’m hearing and requires a similar amount of mental effort (not physical effort!) to coordinate. (This is what I meant by “similar mental space”.) The actual problem requires an extra limb operating an extra device, so switching an existing limb to a different device seems a fine approximation to me in terms of the mental effort involved. (For a beginning drummer, I imagine it’s actually easier.)
I think that’s their goal, I think it’s a fine goal, and I don’t have any problem with their execution of it.
We can (and perhaps do) disagree over how a real open-hi-hat feels versus how the RB open-hi-hat feels, but I just think you’re overstating the importance of realism, especially if it induces you to call their choice “game-y and stupid”.
I of course agree that a charted hi-hat pedal would be superior for realism (I explained why I thought it would be a more valuable addition than a second bass-drum pedal on another thread), but the charting problem probably makes that a non-starter.
Actually, I guess that it was probably game-y-ness that led them to limit things to three limbs (well, and cost, but) in expert mode. Probably a tiny fraction of the population is playing expert mode drums, and to have required four limbs to pull it off would have driven that fraction of the population even smaller. But given that you accept 3-limb-input, my above comments stand.
