Getting themselves into the game

At the moment, though, they’re cracking up while gazing at a cocktail menu modeled after the so-called Seven Deadly Sins. Our waiter has helpfully informed us that, as a rule of thumb, whatever sin people can’t remember is precisely the sin they’re guilty of embracing. The extravagantly tattooed, gussied-up lead singer Helen McWilliams - stage name “The Hellion’’ - throws back her head and laughs loudly. She totally forgot “vanity.’’ “But hey, that’s to be expected right?’’ she blurts out, not particularly shocked at her omission.

Indeed, it could be argued that vanity is an essential attribute - not just expected but required for the frontwoman of an attention-grabbing punk band. In fact, turning an increasing number of heads is something Vagiant (Boston) has become quite adept at ever since McWilliams - a senior writer at Harmonix, the Cambridge-based maker of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games - asked around at work whether anyone would be up for forming a rock ’n’ roll outfit.

“I wanted to play in a band since I was little and saw Joan Jett on TV,’’ says McWilliams, whose band plays Great Scott on Sunday. “I tried the guitar when I was 13 but found out that it was hard to learn how to play. So I just took pictures of myself holding it. I have a lot of pictures of me holding a guitar. But when I started working at Harmonix I was hanging out with a lot of musicians. And I realized that if they could play an instrument, I could do it too.’’

When she sent out her query about starting a band, “all the boys laughed at me,’’ says McWilliams. “But a couple of girls answered, and we played our first show three months after I first picked up a guitar. We only played four songs. One of them was ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ by Lita Ford.’’

Four years, two albums, and a couple of lineup shifts later (McWilliams is now the sole Harmonix employee in the band), she and drummer Lauren “LoWreck’’ Recchia are the only remaining original members of the group, which now includes bassist Julie “TwoTimes’’ and the lead guitarist who goes only by the name “Smokey.’’ The stage names, they say, are a heck of a lot cooler than their real ones - and besides, who needs stalkers?

Vagiant (Boston) recently attracted unwanted attention from another band that claimed to have had the name “Vagiant’’ first and threatened legal action if McWilliams’s group didn’t change its. Hence the parenthetical geographical marker that appears on the band’s latest self-released album, “Trash Candy.’’

The band’s blistering take on the classic punk-pop sound of female bands like the Runaways and L7 - plus its cheeky, smarter-than-they-sound songs about tattooed women, sugar daddies, and karate kids - garnered the group a Boston Music Awards nomination for punk act of the year. To the band’s incredulity, the nomination placed the foursome alongside such venerable acts as Mission of Burma and the Dropkick Murphys (who won the award), among others.

“When we started this band, we sat around and talked about the fact that if we worked really, really hard, we could play a Wednesday night at O’Brien’s,’’ says McWilliams. “That was our goal! The BMAs were never on our radar.’’ Smokey nods and laughs in agreement. “It was crazy,’’ she says. “When we walked in at [the BMAs], the manager of the Liberty Hotel was saying, ‘We’re so honored to have you here.’ We were used to getting thrown out of Best Westerns!’’

Ah, star treatment. Major placement in a hugely popular video game franchise will do that. The band knows that part of its fast-rising profile also has to do with the fact that its music - specifically, the songs “Seven’’ and “FTK’’ (the latter an edited version of a tune about an Allston bar that originally had a naughty word in the title and chorus) - appears in Harmonix’s Rock Band. Hundreds of thousands of gamers who will never see Vagiant (Boston) play a club are playing along to its songs in living rooms across America. It’s a new and strange kind of celebrity.

“The extent to which people adore us is insane,’’ says drummer Recchia. “They’ll write us and say, ‘You guys are so much better than Green Day.’ And we’re like, uuuuhhhhh, no.’’

McWilliams describes the experience as “totally weird.’’ “Because the people who play that game are young, they also have never heard Black Sabbath, so they actually think I am as equally famous as Ozzy Osbourne,’’ she says. “When I reply to their e-mail, they say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you e-mailed me back! And I’ll say to them, ‘Why not? I had nothing else to do except watch ‘Days of Our Lives.’ ’’