For Christmas, Santa Claus gave me Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, just as I asked him to. I had never played it before, but so many people — people who don’t often play videogames — recommended it to me, that I knew it would be a big hit at the Callahan/Sarli house. Sure enough, it was…and is.

It’s been such a hit, in fact, that one of our friends (Angie, for those who keep track of these things) went out and bought a second guitar, just so we all could rock a little harder, a little more cooperatively.

I don’t know if you’ve ever played the game, but it works like this. The controller itself is a guitar. There are five buttons on the frets of the guitar, each a different color, and a button where you “strum.” You select a song (my version has tunes ranging from Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” to Metallica’s “One”), and the game starts. The screen has two main components. The first is the background, which shows your little videogame character and his/her band, playing whatever song you selected. The foreground is supposed to be the neck of the guitar, but it looks like a long straight road. The lines on the fret come at you in time with music, and as the guitar part of the song starts, little colored dots come at you, each dot corresponding to the “note” you have to play on your guitar. With one finger (or group of fingers), you push down the buttons on the neck, and with your other hand, you “strum” the guitar at the appropriate time to “play” the note. And that’s kind of it.

It looks better than it sounds.

[P.S.: That was on Expert, which is ridiculous; on Easy, it moves much slower, and you only have to use three fret buttons, not all five, like in the video.]

Anyway, the point I want to make is not that I got Guitar Hero III, or how it works, or why you should get it too. The point I want to make — or rather, the topic about which I want to share a sense of wonder is — how amazing videogames have gotten.

And I’m not talking about graphics, though certainly they have become ridiculous. What I’m talking about is how the concept of gaming in general has exploded (or is ready to explode) beyond the conventional understanding of a game. But…and this is the part I think is the coolest…at the same time, games like Guitar Hero are just as conventional, in some ways, as Pitfall or Super Mario Bros.

Think about it. In Guitar Hero, the goal is to get to the end of the song. If you play the notes poorly, you get booed off stage, so the success of each round is not ensured. In Super Mario Bros., for example, the goal is much the same: Get to the end of the level. Between the beginning and the end, you have to push a button to perform a certain act in the game world: jump over a mushroom man, send a turtle shell flying, or clear a gap in the environment. In Guitar Hero, you have to push a button to play the note, but because of the way the notes come at you, as if they’re on a road, you could almost think of it as having to jump over them or on them or whatever.

The point is: the game is little more than an exercise in hand/eye coordination accompanied by the desire to achieve a specific goal.

What’s great about Guitar Hero is that they’ve mapped the exercise to fun music (even the “bad” songs are fun), so when you aren’t the person actually playing the game, it’s still fun to watch and listen to. The day after Christmas, we had five people (Dawn and I included) packed into our little “chill spot” room, drinking beers, hanging out, watching and playing Guitar Hero. For like five hours. And because of the music and the inherent social aspects of the game (celebrating good runs, “booing” poor ones), it didn’t feel like we were sitting around playing video games. It just felt like a party.

And that’s what’s amazing about some of the videogames they’re designing now. They’re actually breaking down the barrier between “gamers” and regular people. They’re simply making fun games that just happen to take place on a TV screen.

That’s a development I can get behind.