Yes - I admit being a folkie gamer is somewhat of a niche thing. Folkie Gamer Esperantist Knitter even more so...
As said above, it's pretend. Wish fulfillment. So that you can be a rock star for a bit. I played a lot of Guitar Hero and Gran Turismo 5 at the same time. So I was basically doing a gig as a rock star and then playing with my stable of expensive sports cars. Living the dream...
That said, the latest versions have the "Pro" setting and the MIDI input. There's a specific guitar controller made by Fender that has 6 strings and a button on every fret, so you are in effect having to play the guitar correctly. I think tab comes up on the game screen instead of just the coloured buttons. Similarly for the keyboard; on the most difficult settings you actually have to play the tune. It's a party game; as said, the drums are pretty much just electric drums, and the idea is that a pretty good guitarist can play along with a toddler who is just learning how to press the coloured buttons in time to the music with it set so they don't get penalised if they fail. It's a music immersion game that is designed to be played with friends of all musical abilities; and if they enjoy it and want to play a real instrument after, all the better.
Mi neniam aŭdis tiun diron. Mi ŝatas ĝin!
"Tio estas volapukaĵo al mi" is basically the Esperanto equivalent of "It's all Greek to me".
And on unisonoric - you can set the Streb with note layouts where you basically tell it what note to play on pull and push, so a unisonoric layout can be made by simply setting the same note on both draws on the button. You could technically turn it into a little button PA really; C scale on the outside row and corresponding sharps and flats in the obvious places on the inner row. You'd have problems with the basses of course, unless you had a 12 bass one and had each button set as C C# D Eb E F F# G G# A Bb B. But mine only has 8 bass buttons.
On Streb's comment - that's how I expected it to be, but I think the game was just far too sensitive to the bellows movement and because it's a game where the correct note and ONLY the correct note must be hit at the right time, it kept failing me for hitting the "wrong" note when what I was doing is how I normally play - finger on button, activate bellows in chosen direction. If I even breathed the bellows a micrometre in the wrong direction it was failing me because it had detected the "wrong" note before the right one.
Streb Instruments - maker and purveyor of the finest hand-crafted video game controllers.
Take a look at this, for a drum kit from a music game being used to play a roleplaying game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HehglAbr7xsAnd all of the iterations of Accordion Hero are parodies. They came out as in Guitar Hero 2 they had a spoof teaser trailer for "Accordion Hero, coming in 2008" and it "went viral" as the phrase goes.