I came across this brief South Park clip parodying the generally acknowledged ridiculousness of people's dedication to Guitar Hero, given that a similar level of dedication to practicing with a real guitar would lead to having an actual skill rather than a made-up skill that only applies to the game. In short, Stan's dad finds the kids playing Guitar Hero, shows them that he can actually play the songs on a real guitar, and they make fun of him and go back to playing the game. Later, Stan's dad sneaks down to try it out, and is terrible. This matches my experience in that real musicians tend to be terrible at first because the timing of the game is just enough off that you have to adjust your internal tempo to make it work, so if anything, it's slightly regressive to real playing. I'm sure it's worse for guitar players who have to fight the urge to go to the correct fret, versus me as a pianist who is only fighting the timing.

While lots of people have questioned the acquisition of this made-up skill, few have asked the question: why is it that people so readily prefer the fake world of Guitar Hero to the real world of Playing Guitar? In short, my answer is that Guitar Hero is a surprisingly good computer tutor, albeit for a made up skill, that does many of the things a good human tutor does, and it's a lot more fun too.  Good teachers tend to create students that come back for more, and this is what Guitar Hero is doing.

Researchers have been probing the question of why one-on-one tutoring is such an effective learning strategy. The problem is that the difference between a highly-trained tutor and a unskilled tutor is surprisingly small. Upon investigation, it appears that tutors tend to do a few things that seem to make a huge difference:

1. They help present and frame problems to provide a clear path for tackling subject matter. Often students have trouble knowing how to even approach a problem and knowing how to get off on the right foot makes all the difference.
2. They act as a source of general knowledge so that students can feel free to get clarification on issues in a way that they might be too embarrassed or hurried to do in a classroom setting, and which they might not have access to if they were studying alone.
3. This is the big one: they provide affective reinforcement in the form of praise and accolades for successful achievement, and this reinforcement is very close to the time of execution so that it has a very strong effect (unlike a test that you often take and then wait days for results).

It's a pretty simple set of things that almost any tutor seems to implicitly do, considering the difference it makes. Guitar Hero does a lot of this as well:

1. The problem of learning to play guitar is framed as the playing of and scoring on invidual songs, slowly increasing in difficulty.
2. Not really much here on general knowledge, but the subject matter of playing a made-up guitar is so contrived so as to make this somewhat irrelevant.
3. It's huge in this area: with crowd reaction, both in-game and often with people around you in the real world you get instant feedback, not to mention the overall "rock star" experience with star power, on-screen avatars doing all kinds of tricks, and so on.

In addition to this, it offers a few things that real-world guitar instruction can't hope to imitate: the concert experience, and the simplification of the instrument to a few frets while still allowing players to play actual music instead of twinkle twinkle little star.

So here's my modest proposal: someone needs to modify a guitar so that you have to actually play the real notes on the guitar in order for it to count. I did a search on "guitar hero real instrument" to see if this has been done. I've found the inverse and converse of this concept, with people retrofitting real guitars to play guitar hero. as well as using guitar hero controllers to make real music, but no one is stepping up to try to give people the ability to use all the support offered by guitar hero, but wind up with an actual skill. If anyone knows of an effort in this regard, I'd love to hear about it.