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Dancing With Myself - On DDR Culture
Thanks to Waxy.org for pointing to an overlooked March 2004 Pitch.com story discussing scenes from America's Dance Dance Revolution arcade culture, as the article starts: "In the strange world of Kansas City's Dance Dance Revolutionaries, Wayne Giles didn't step so lightly." It goes on to describe Giles' transition "from social outcast to high roller in a crowd funded by allowances and minimum-wage paychecks", and his eventual "skimming... [of] more than a thousand dollars' worth of tokens [as an arcade tech]", before his exposure and return to local tournament play, arguing of DDR: "Lately it's all about speed. Whatever happened to playing for fun?"
I fail to understand why this keeps getting posted as news. It was an underhanded story to begin with, as the reporter from the paper came to the community of DDRKC saying they were going to write a story about the positive aspects of DDR and the DDRKC community. The trash you read in the 'article' is the result.
For those who don't RTFA, they try to say that DDR players are all lifeless scum just because one of them did some stupid and illegal activites - oh, and he played DDR. DDR is NOT the focus of the piece, and to most intelligent readers the writer's lame attempt to connect the two is compeltely ridiculous.
This has been rehashed several times on DDRFreak, BoingBoing, and various other metablogs, news sites, and DDR discussion groups. It's an old story that was never news. Let it die.
-ThatGuy
Site Admin for http://www.ddrkc.com/
Yeah, I know it's an old story, but it has a moral to it that's always worth remembering.
Never trust a journalist, especially when he's asking you questions.
As part of my job, there's a possibility that I'll have occasional, peripheral contact with the national media. As such, I've been given several lessons on the big DOs and DON'Ts. It's clear from reading the forum URL that somebody kindly mentioned that these guys violated pretty much all of the basic rules. Broadly speaking, these are as follows:
1) Never assume the journalist is on your side or shares your perspective. This is probably the most critical of all. On TV, hotshot journalists are usually portrayed as giving their victims a hard time... screaming into their faces and asking obviously penetrating questions to leap right to the bottom of the matter. This is bullshit. Any journalist worth his salt, who isn't acting up live for the cameras, knows he isn't going to get answers this way. A journalist will usually adopt a friendly tone; he'll pretend to be on your side, willing to let you put your view out to the unwashed masses. He'll seem reasonable, he'll seem to care about the same stuff as you.
Don't fall for this. Ask yourself where he's coming from and what his angle is. Most importantly, try to look at yourself as he sees you. The guys interviewed for this article were too enthralled by what they were doing to give this the slightest thought. They thought it was wonderful that they'd built up a community around their hobby. The journalist doesn't think this; he has a broader perspective, he's seen other hobby-based communities and this is nothing special to him. Judging by the article, what he saw was a tragi-comic group of nerds indulging in an undignified hobby at the expense of what he and his readers considered to be a normal, successful life. Had the subjects possessed even the slightest bit of savvy, they would have seen this coming.
2) Never tell a journalist anything you don't have to. This isn't saying you should lie; that's generally a spectacularly bad idea. But don't volunteer *any* information you don't have to. Bear in mind my first rule; the journalist may have a very different take on this information to your own. Be especially cautious in social situations, especially parties. The effects of alcohol and an urge to show off can be lethal there.
3) Be aware of what other information the journalist has access to. No journalist will base his story on a few interviews with people with an obvious interest in the matter at hand. If you have an embarrassing livejournal, he *will* find it. Believe it or not, journalists know how to use google.
4) Do not overestimate your own "rights" compared to those of the journalist. TV is a real killer here. When you see an interview on a TV show which goes "off the record", it's easy to believe you can stop a journalist repeating your words just by telling him "you can't print that". This is bollocks. There is no such thing as "off the record". Moreover, I'd consider it *extremely* unlikely that any of the people mentioned in the article questioned have anything even vaguely approaching a case for libel. Even if they did, they'd get a tiny apology in 9pt font tucked away in the corner of page 37. Modern democratic societies give a lot of protection to the press, for a lot of good reasons. We all expect our politicians to be held to account; don't be surprised when the same standards are applied to you by the press.
Sorry to rant... it just seems that the utter lack of savvy demonstrated here is too clueless to let pass. Press interest in gaming in general has really kicked off over the last few years. If you ever find yourself being approached by the media, please, for the love of god, bear this in mind.