Newsweek asks the asinine question of the week: will Guitar Hero make fewer people play guitar?

Clearly, Guitar Hero is fun. But by bestowing the rewards of virtuosity to those who haven’t spent years to earn it, is it dumbing down musicianship? If a teenager can easily become a make-believe guitar hero, does that mean he won’t ever bother to master the real thing?

Or maybe the game will, instead, remind people that good ol’ rock and roll exists in a world dominated by pop and hip-hop. Maybe it will instead reignite this aspirational fantasy in a new generation. Maybe these guys will realize they just can’t get the hookers and blow from the rock and roll lifestyle, even when the XBox 360 version comes out.

Still, here’s the really intriguing part of the article.

“One of the issues that musical instruments have is that they’re difficult to learn,” says Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of Gibson Guitar, which is aggressively integrating computer technology into new product lines. “Building calluses and painstakingly learning all the musical fingering is not creative, but is the discipline to get the creative rewards … In the future we want to reduce the crap you have to deal with to allow people access to that creativity.” It sounds great—just as the Devil’s offer must have struck Robert Johnson at the crossroads.

One wonders what Gibson is working on. It’s probably nowhere near as cool as what I initially imagined.