Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

If The Fonz had a jukebox to make him look cool and make women swoon, The Fonz’ oft-ignored and altogether less handsome uni-browed half brother Alfred Bianco Panzelli had a DDR machine to make him look like an awkward, charisma-less buffoon and make women projectile vomit into his eyes.

Welcome to the horrible world of Dance Dance Revolution.

At it’s very essence, DDR is a video game that you play by dancing. Usually you play a video game with a joystick or a gun, but DDR is played on a squared platform on which you dance. The platform has 4 pads; up, down, left and right. When the game starts, music plays and on screen you will see these directional arrows scroll up in a variety of arrangements - it is the aim of the game to “step” on the corresponding arrow beneath your feet in time with the music’s beat, when it reaches the top of the screen.

DDR is to dancing what dot-to-dot cartoons are to drawing, or what swallowing iron fillings then regurgitating them whilst underwater is to singing.

That is to say, by and large, DDR is not dancing in any way whatsoever.

There are varying ability levels of DDR players; pretty much the entire spectrum of which could be described as the exact opposite of dancing. Let’s take a look at the two extremes:

Newbie DDRer: Having wasted a few coins actually working out how the frick to play the game, the Newbie dancer settles down and chooses an easy song to start their career in the art of electro spaz. The beat starts and the Newbie dancer - hands firmly by their sides like the first school disco they ever went to - clumsily plods their feet down on the pads according to the arrows on screen, stamping a little too hard to the chagrin of the experienced DDR players waiting patiently behind, who are viewing the symbolic equivalent of somebody forcing a priest to watch a gang of Scientologists urinate all over a statue of the Virgin Mary. Rhythm-less and awkward, the Newbie dancer leaves the podium deflated, but not without the desire to have “just one more go- “.

Experienced DDRererer: Proudly lining up a row of coins on the machine, the Experienced dancer secures his place on the machine and limelight for the next hour, to the annoyance of all the people waiting in line behind who are too polite / intimidated by the dancing skill that his row of coins implies, to say anything. The Experienced dancer has long since grown bored of the lack of challenge the regular song list provides but knows a “cheat” to get an extra difficult mode, which is the only mode he now plays. The music starts playing and an incomprehensible flurry of ups, lefts, downs and rights scrolls along the screen at breakneck speed. The Experienced dancer’s legs - now moving beyond the speed at which human eyes are able to decipher legs - are somehow hitting every single arrow exactly on time, as denoted by a “PERFECT!” signal that flashes on screen with each step. The Experienced dancer steps off the podium with a broad grin, to scattered applause - most of the audience so impressed by the sheer physicality of the display they just saw that they forget it was more like watching RoadRunner on too much tartrazine than it was anything resembling the act of dance.

Somewhere though, in between these two extremes there is a place where people can actually play the game well and put on a good (or at least visually amusing in a positive way) show with some twirls, dancing with their back to the screen and pointless but pretty hand movements.

DDR is a now-aging video game developed by Japanese entertainment giant Konami (up up down down left right left right B A B A START!), and marked the start of a new phenomenon in Japan and spread to several other Asian countries like a kind of terrible mutated virus, like SARS or Bird Flu - except with MUCH more dire consequences.

It reinvigorated the music game genre at a time where games like Beatmania had tried and only received a small, cult following. The innovation of the dance mat mechanism was swiftly copied by other companies - most notably for the Korean games “Pump It Up” and “EZ2Dance” and other offerings from Konami such as Para Para Paradise, which is played not with your feet, but with your hands, using motion sensors. Although the craze has died down in Japan to some extent, these machines are still popular all over Asia and there is a growing following in America. England has yet to be really affected, at least that’s what I pray. Korea even has annual tournaments in which people perform actual break-dance routines on the machines - whilst still hitting all the arrows at the right times. In centuries to come, when the aliens write the new Bible, all of this will be cited as the reasons why they had to destroy civilisation as we know it.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2004 at 8:19 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.