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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?"
Why do we care about some teenager who was scamming tokens from an arcade he worked at and playing DDR?
What's next, "When Valets Attack! (the change in your ashtray)".
Or maybe "Dressing Myself - On clothing shoplifting culture".
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
This story isn't well written. Am I supposed to be convinced that it has a cult following simply because it was in King of the Hill, Lost in Translation, and a Skechers commercial? Holy cow, it MUST be successful! And I'm not sure where they were going with the description of how he was a goth. He was a goth... so what? What exactly is this story trying to do? If sympathy was the point, I'm not getting it. If it's to tell a story, it's done so poorly that I missed it. If there's another point... tell me please.
-Dizzle
"I most likely AM so interested in myself."
You can read their comments at the DDRKC forum. Remember this article came out in March, so this thread is probably long since dead.
7d9e63e9501751ff4bf9307989d5623d *SheepHead
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.
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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.
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.
I've played DDR since 2000/2001, but only started to play it seriously since fal 2003. I'm into heavy mode, and can do a lot of songs people won't even attempt. I don't find freeze arrows lame. They require specific strategies and movements because you must switch your feet up in certain ways to satisfy them. It's not just the catch-all of "faster, more" that a lot of songs use at the heavy difficulty level.
;)
I think what needs to happen is Konami putting in some more features, like an arcade performance/freestyle mode (since most of the videos you mention happened to be on standard mode, which isn't especially suited to freestyling), and things like speed modifiers (there's a hacked DDR Exteme plus near me that has normal, 110%, and 120% song speed options).
DDR's not dead, it's just the same game it was 4 years ago. It needs more new features to keep things interesting, because there are (as you acknowledge) physical limits to everything. I can do Max 300, though
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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.
If anything, freeze arrows force people out of that problem. You have to learn to use both feet well, and also learn not to return to the middle of the pad after every step. Before freeze arrows, there was much less impetus to do that.
Rob
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.