2. Tedious Technique Training Gets Fun
If there is one thing I hated more than anything about learning guitar, it was practicing fundamentals. Ask any guitarist - or any musician for that matter - what is the least glorious or least engaging thing they had to practice and they will answer with something along the lines of, "Memorizing literally hundreds of chords" or "Practicing the hundreds of scales." Why do these tasks suck? Well, for the same reason that memorizing vocabulary sucks. It's memorizing. Sure, there are mathematical principles behind the structure of scales that would help you to understand why they are the way they are, but the only way to learn them is still to just plain memorize them through hours of practice. Rocksmith is the only thing in the entire world that makes that process fun. The Guitarcade is full of minigames designed to help players practice those fundamental skills of playing guitar that make the difference between a guy with a guitar and a real musician. They have everything from "Dawn of the Chordead" - which challenges your ability to quickly switch between unique chords by having zombies charge out you and giving you machine guns that can only be fired by the correct chord - to "Scale Runner" - in which you choose from one of the hundreds of available scales and have to play the scale faster and faster to keep your avatar from falling to his death. And some of the minigames might even prove to be a challenge for advance players. Games like "Big Swing Baseball" require players to hear a tone and play the corresponding note on the guitar, building pitch awareness, one of the most important tools for any musician. All of these manage to keep me interested in practicing fundamental skills that I had ignored for years, because despite their simplicity and the fact that they are asking me to practice something I have always considered immensely boring, the games reach that perfect balance of addictive point chasing and simple cuteness that mobile apps seem to always chase.