A SUPER AWESOME USELESS SKILLWHY I BUILD GAMES YOU PLAY WITH A REAL GUITAR

The useless skill (not really)

As my daughter grew up, we played Roblox together. It was our thing. Some of the games in there are music games: arrows fly down the screen to music and you hit the matching arrow keys at exactly the right moment. Miss the timing and you lose.

She got fast, I mean really fast. Her fingers flew across those keys, perfectly in time, faster than I could follow. I have been playing music for a long time and consider myself to have great rhythm, but I couldn't play basic mode on it. It's a real skill. It takes hours of practice, sharp timing and serious muscle memory.

And one day, half joking, I told her:

"That is a super awesome useless skill you will never be able to use outside of this game."

Me, being a dad

We both laughed. But it stuck with me.

What bugged me about it

Don't get me wrong: those games are a blast, and what she could do was impressive. I just wished all that practice could follow her outside the game.

All that practice. All that timing, focus and muscle memory. And it was locked inside one game. The day you stop playing, the skill is gone with it.

I've played music since long before she was born. I've played in bands, played for friends and family, and written and recorded my own songs and albums. I know what it takes to get good at an instrument: the same things she was pouring into those arrow keys. Timing. Repetition. Hands that know where to go before your brain catches up. She is a natural.

The difference is that music comes with you. It's something you can play at a campfire, at a family get-together, on a stage. For some people it even turns into a career.

What if the controller was a guitar?

That's the question I couldn't shake. Keep everything that makes games fun: the quick rounds, the score to beat, the "one more try." But make the thing in your hands a real instrument.

Then every minute of practice builds something real. Learning where the notes are on the fretboard. Playing in time. Training your ear. Skills that still work when the game is turned off.

My daughter is proof of the difference. Her arrow-key skill stayed in that game. But she's also been learning piano, and that skill goes everywhere with her: she's played for our family, and she has a piano recital coming up.

How the games do it

Fret Arcade games run in your web browser. You plug in your guitar (or just play near your computer or phone's microphone), and the game listens to every note you play. Hit the right note at the right time and you score. No special controller, no plastic buttons.

• Fretblast teaches you every note on the fretboard, one string at a time.
• Fretblast Adventure turns the same notes into a quest with bosses to beat.
• Learn the fretboard is the method behind it, if you want to read before you play.
• The free guitar tuner gets you in tune before you start.

No guitar with you? You can tap the notes on screen to keep practicing anywhere. But the goal is always the same: get better at the real thing.

That's the test every game has to pass. If a skill only works inside the game, it doesn't belong here.

JohnCreator of Fret Arcade