A game so impenetrable that it seemed designed to make you walk away ... Demon's Souls. A game so impenetrable that it seemed designed to make you walk away ... Demon's Souls. What does my love for impossibly difficult video games say about me? From Demon Souls to Baby Steps, challenging games keep a certain type of player coming back for more. Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox?

So, by now we've all seen Trombone Champ, right? The music game – in which you play a cartoon trombonist making noises that bear only the vaguest resemblance to music – went viral last week; if you've not seen it, here's the tweet from PC Gamer that started it all. I promise that your day will be vastly improved by watching this video. This game is very, very funny. It's "a joke first and a game second," its creator Dan Vecchitto told the Guardian. Part of its comedy is in the presentation – the discordant visual details, the random made-up facts on the loading screens – and part of it is in the sheer ridiculousness of what you're doing and how dismal it sounds.

Welcome to Pushing Buttons, the Guardian's gaming newsletter. If you'd like to receive it in your inbox every week, just pop your email in below – and check your inbox (and spam) for the confirmation email. Despite the hundreds of happy hours I spent playing Guitar Hero in the late 00s, I feel slightly resentful towards it. In my late teens I was a decent player of the actual guitar, but Guitar Hero was so much more fun that I ended up ditching my actual instrument and playing that instead. I became superhumanly good at it, and meanwhile I remain an average player of the real guitar to this day.

Music has always been central to video games. Motifs from popular franchises like The Legend of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. are so canonized that people who don't play games could likely point them out. Even games with licensed soundtracks like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater have gone on to reflect and inform the tastes of an entire generation of players. But for a brief and fleeting moment in the mid-2000s, music became central to the way we played and interacted with games--and the genre this spawned, the rhythm game, became one of the most profitable in the world. By the latter half of the 2000s, off the back of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises, the rhythm game cemented its commercial dominance.

Current chart sensations Lizzo and Billie Ellish don't stand on stage with guitars around their neck like Eric Clapton, Slash from Guns N' Roses or Bruce Springsteen did (and still do.) So what are guitar makers to do to keep their factories humming? Turn to streaming, classic rock and YouTube to reach tomorrow's guitar player. The NAMM show, a collection of music store operators, music professionals and tens of thousands of fans is concluding this weekend here, where guitars of every color and imaginable shape were on display. The goal for many guitar makers: to either get older folks to spring out more money to add even more guitars to the collection, or better yet, get tomorrow's generation excited to start playing with new shapes.

"Video games have not only helped the music industry survive, but thrive on entirely new levels," Steve Schnur tells me. As the worldwide executive and president of music at game publisher EA, his team – many of whom have been professional musicians and singer/songwriters – work with some of the biggest music acts in the world, licensing music for video game series like Fifa, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and NHL. Since the 90s, when licensed music became prevalent in games, series such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout have become just as well-known for their soundtracks as they are for their gameplay. For millions of people, video games have been a way to discover new favourite bands or dive into other musical genres. And because people discover this music while playing a game they love, they develop a strong emotional attachment to it.

With a paralyzing spinal cord injury, the biological wiring that hooks up our controlling brains to our useful limbs gets snipped, leading to permanent loss of sensation and control and usually a lifetime of extra health care. Researchers have spent years working to repair those lost connections, allowing paralyzed patients to sip coffee and enjoy a beer with robotic limbs controlled by just their minds. Now, researchers have gone a step further, allowing a paralyzed person to control his own hand with just his mind. In a study published Wednesday in Nature, researchers report using a "neural bypass" that reconnects a patient's mental commands for movement to responsive muscles in his limbs, creating somewhat of a synthetic nervous system. The pioneering patient, Ian Burkhart, a 24-year-old man left with quadriplegia after a diving accident almost six years ago, can once again move his hand.