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?"

Comments

DDRKC members comment

[SheepHead]

This is a pretty old article and the DDRKC members were pretty upset by the article's focus on the bad choices of one person rather than the DDR subculture. It seems the author spent a lot of time with DDRKC members and they all felt the article would be about their group or DDR in general. In the end, the author chose to try to portray it as the "seedy side of a popular game" which upset a lot of the people who were interviewed.

You can read their comments at the DDRKC forum. Remember this article came out in March, so this thread is probably long since dead.

Downturn

[Apreche]

DDR has definitely been on the downturn recently. I first discovered it 4 years ago and was reluctant to play because it looked so stupid. But of course, as soon as I gave it a try I was hooked. At first we played 3rd and 4th mix. We picked fun songs and tried to find ways to do cool stuff. DDR was at its peak around the time 5th mix came out. These were the days when ddrfreak would have videos of crazy freestyles that were just plain unbelievable. DJ8ball's videos are still amazing.

Then around the time 6th mix came out and the hold arrows appeared its been going down. For a multitude of reasons most tournaments nowadays, the ones that still exist, are just hit the arrows tournaments. Every new version of DDR stresses harder and harder arrow combinations that go faster and faster. Playing for fun is non-existant. If you go to an arcade and do some fun songs on trick you'll have normal people gaping with the usual oohs and aahs. But the punk kids who can hit every arrow on MAX300 will scoff at you.

Just to show an example. Last year at the boardwalk in wildwood, NJ there were DDR machines ranging from 3rd mix all the way up. This year, every single DDR machine has been upgraded to Extreme. Fourth Mix Plus is still the best DDR ever, but finding it is almost impossible now.

It's the tragedy of the modern arcade industry. Pac-Man gets replace with Ms. Pac-man. Cruis'n World replaced with Cruis'n Exotica. And most arcade games now only seperate themselves from the home console due to non-standard interfaces. Gun games, dance games, racing games, etc. So even if they get released for PC/Console its not the same, even if you get cobalt flux. So games in arcades that get sequels and upgrades run the risk of being lost forever. And if a game has a culture surrounding it, like DDR, then that culture is at the mercy of arcade owners and the game's manufacturer despite the gamers opinion. For home games the gamers decide what to buy and what not to. But with arcades the arcade owner decides, and guess what, most arcade owners aren't gamers.

wow

[chill182]

I've been playing DDR in various arcades for two years now but this article makes it sound a lot more interesting than it actually is.

Groupies? C'mon.

Actually, it's no worse than arcades in general.

[Moryath]

Arcades in general, if you look at them, have been in a slow decline in the USA for quite a while.

Why? Exactly the reasons you mention, plus a few more. New versions replace old, even when the "new" isn't necessarily any better (or oftentimes is even worse), on the assumption that a "new" machine will prompt gamers to spend more money beating it. And it works, for about two weeks.

DDR iterations have gotten plain silly with the addition of "Freeze" arrows, that's obvious - it took one of the problems many new players had, that I referred to as a "kickstand" mentality (standing on one leg all the time, trying to hit the pad with the other foot), and forces players to do it.

The other problem you miss - and it seems to be peculiar to America, because of how America was introduced to arcade machines - is complete lack of maintenance. Arcade owners in America, even those running an Aladdin's Castle or something similar, don't want to send out for the repair guy until a machine is completely unplayable or the coin slot isn't working properly. Arcade owners in malls or arcade machines put into a little nook in a movie theater, it takes yet longer to repair even a popular machine.

Why is this? It's the Pac-Man mentality. When machines were one button and a joystick, arcade owners considered them a low-risk investment. Stick it in a corner, plug it in, collect the quarters once a week, and that was that. You'll still find machines in rural America that have been on, non-stop, for close to 15 years - the screen may be warping, the joystick gone completely loose, but the machine owner sees no reason to send for a repairman because people still dump in their quarters.

Unfortunately, this contributes to the decline of the arcade. When you can't trust the quality of the machine, many players simply aren't going to make the trip merely to spend more money on the arcade machines. Even unfaithful console translations that have soft-pads or crappy plastic guns start to seem preferable to showing up, only to find an "out of order" sign or, worse yet, dumping in $1-$2 worth of coins only to find out that an important button's not working, the pad's sensors are going dead and breaking out of "freeze" steps in the middle or just not registering steps in the first place, or the joystick will no longer register a push to the left.

If you don't believe me that the reputation of arcades for lack of maintenance is killing them, look at the corresponding upswing in the popularity of home "arcade" style controllers, like the X-Arcade joystick.