Music has long struck me as a kind of magic. In terms of my life essentials, it ranks only just below oxygen, food, water, shelter and love. For 11 years I have been attempting to conjure some of that magic myself by learning to play guitar.

Yet for most of those years I practiced fitfully, and at some point I stopped improving. When my progress plateaued, so did my enthusiasm. Despite the pleasure I derive from watching a person with a six-string plugged into an amplifier, plucking and strumming to elicit beautiful noise, I seemed destined to never fully master this iconic instrument.

But then I discovered a video game that rekindled my obsession. It’s called Rocksmith, and it is designed specifically to teach people to play guitar. Earlier games, namely Guitar Hero and Rock Band, had shown that tens of millions of people could become hooked on playing fake, simplified instruments while fake, simplified musical scores scrolled down their televisions. After clocking in several jam sessions, many players even began to sound competent. But that expertise evaporated the second the game shut off.

Laurent Detoc, the North America president of Ubisoft, a game development studio, hated the gulf that separated actual and simulated musicianship. In 2011 he told the San Francisco Business Times, “I just could not believe the amount of waste that had gone in people spending so much time with plastic guitars.” His company had assigned some designers to figuring out how to make playing real guitars just as fun for gamers as jamming on a plastic replica. What they came up with is, to my mind, the purest demonstration of the power of gamification — using the principles of game play to make actual learning feel addictive. Case in point: I’ve learned to play more songs in two and a half years with Rocksmith than in the previous eight years of lackluster progress combined.

Jerry Cantrell, lead guitarist/vocalist of Alice in Chains, playing Rocksmith

My attempts to learn guitar followed a path familiar to many teenage rock enthusiasts. They began with an acoustic guitar my parents gave me in 2004, for my sixteenth birthday, and weekly lessons with a tutor. My teacher — a bookish, chubby, middle-aged man who looked nothing like Jimi Hendrix — was prescriptive in his instruction. He told me that my left thumb must remain pointing skyward against the back of the neck, regardless of the notes or chord shape required. This dictum puzzled and infuriated me, as none of the popular musicians I’d seen in music videos were so staid in their playing; rather, they were fluid and catlike. I wanted to be like them.

Learning to read music was an unwelcome chore, too, especially when my setlist consisted of nursery rhymes to be wrung out one note at a time. I wanted to learn guitar because an expert player sounded and looked cool, yet there wasn’t much that was cool about my tutor’s dry approach. So I quit lessons.

Many of my favorite songs — from bands such as Tool, Led Zeppelin, Metallica and Rage Against The Machine — sounded thin and bloodless when ineptly fretted on an acoustic guitar. Eventually, my wallet lined with money saved from my first job as a dishwasher at a Sizzler restaurant, I acquired the desired technological upgrade: an electric guitar — a handsome, dark blue copy of the classic Fender Stratocaster — and a 30-watt amp.

Like millions of guitarists before me, I began trying to play by reading free online guitar tablature, which show where notes and chords are positioned on the fretboard, and how to play them. For a time I thrived on this self-directed learning. I’d sit in front of a computer screen for hours, mp3s blasting as I glanced between tab and neck, teaching my fingers how to grip the wood, earning the knowledge note by note. On weekends I’d jam with my more talented friends, hoping that I’d absorb their superior abilities through osmosis.

So it went for several pleasant years.

And then I became frustrated. I didn’t know how to improve my skill set, and I lost motivation. The instrument sat untouched for months at a time. Years, even. My guitar became a piece of home decor.

It would take something special to lift me from this funk. In August 2012 I discovered a video game disc marked Rocksmith, which came with what looked like a regular guitar cable. Most people haven’t heard of the game — it’s sold a few million copies worldwide, but unless you were browsing in a store or happened upon a review, you wouldn’t know it existed. The graphics look nice enough, but there’s nothing astonishing about the game’s mechanics. But I don’t care.

Here’s why: learning guitar is fucking hard. There’s a reason that millions of people start studying it but few stick with it. The learning curve is steep, and it can take years before you sound anything but incompetent. To have a game with an intelligent, intuitive design that supports and motivates this difficult act is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of video game design.

The idea behind Rocksmith is simple: to improve on Guitar Hero and Rock Band by plugging actual guitars into a gaming console. The technological insight that made it possible was Ubisoft’s ‘real tone’ cable. The cable plugs into the guitar to capture audio from the instrument, converts the signal from analog to digital, and sends the result to Rocksmith through a USB connection. Rocksmith then detects the notes within the instrument’s signal in real time, and displays that data on the screen as a ‘hit’ or ‘miss.’

The software leans heavily on the work of Ubisoft’s ‘note-trackers,’ such as Brian McCune. On McCune’s first day in the San Francisco office, in November 2010, he played an early build of the game for seven hours. McCune powered up the game, plugged the real tone cable into an electric guitar jack, and selected ‘Are You Gonna Go My Way,’ the catchy 1993 hit single by Lenny Kravitz. The song’s lead riff is played high on the guitar neck, a feat that demands ample string-bending dexterity. At the time McCune felt competent as a musician, but mediocre as a guitarist. “This thing took me to the next level,” he says. “It was unreal.”

He noticed how Rocksmith’s ‘dynamic difficulty’ feature intuitively offered him a sparse stream of notes that scrolled gently down the screen. As McCune successfully matched the notes and chords as they appeared, the notes came faster, before the game ultimately revealed the full mechanics of a song. “I could tell, from day one — this thing really works,” says McCune. “I was so excited at the implications of this technology, and how so many people were going to be given the avenue to achieve something they’ve always wanted, but didn’t know how to get there.” He remembers thinking on that first day: “This is my job? Are you serious? This is fantastic!”

He describes the role he was hired for as “the detailed analysis and transcription of music.” “We transcribe every note and nuance of any guitar or bass that appears on the recording. That’s step one,” he says. “The next step beyond that is to break down the performance into small iterations of each musical phrase.” In effect, this means that for every five seconds of music, the note-trackers prescribe at least one note for the player to attempt to fret on the guitar; if the player succeeds, more notes are introduced seamlessly. McCune, a bearded 31-year-old, is uniquely suited to this specialized role — he had spent many years arranging music for competitive high school marching bands, in addition to playing throughout the United States and at Carnegie Hall in New York City as a classically trained percussionist, orchestrator and composer.

McCune and his team of note-trackers listen carefully to each song and laboriously transcribe the individual notes and chords into Ubisoft’s custom-built software program. They slow down songs, isolate specific frequency ranges and look up live footage to see where on the fretboard the musicians are playing. “We’re hearing everything at once,” he says. “It requires a lot of meticulous, fatiguing, nuanced slowing-down of musical sections.”

After tracking all the notes, the next step — the most time-consuming — is to work on each song’s dynamic difficulty levels. “It’s this interesting style of adaptive learning: we want to make sure we’re introducing to players the path of least resistance to learning a music phrase,” he says. “It’s kind of like a giant puzzle: you have to unearth all the information, and then showcase an intelligent way to present the information to someone who’s never seen it before.”