 When the game plays the player we're going to start with a little bit of story time. You see me and Scott We're old. We went to the Rochester Institute of Technology the nerdy school on earth Yeah, it is pretty nerdy because it snows all the time all the dorms are connected with tunnels Do you have to go outside? They have two OC threes? Well, they had two OC threes many years ago What do they have now? I don't even know. It's crazy fast internet. A young rim who surprisingly looks a lot older back then than he does now. And a young Scott in a pirate head Lived in a humble apartment on our ID's campus. You can see the CRTs. There were no cell phones back then It was they were dark ages one day. I saw the stupidest thing I'd ever seen in my life at the anime club Social night, right, which I don't know how I ended up at We were in the anime club. They had a social night, which is play games all night with everybody You know it rolls over to the next day, right? So we go there and I had a D&D, you know game scheduled So we sort of stole a room near the social night and played D&D and when I came back rim was Stomping on this frickin thing. Yeah, so we've seen this thing around. It looks stupid. We're like that's stupid Why would anyone do this? Look at how lame it is. Yeah, power pads sucked I mean it's cool, but it's like you wouldn't actually play power pad So Scott knows how to play Dungeons and Dragons and I go up and I'm like, you know what? I really want to hate on this thing. So I'm gonna play this and tell everyone how stupid it is All right, so I mean you can't knock it if you haven't tried it Of course a lot of people in the internet disagree, but I don't so when I want to hate on something I don't say anything about it and then I try it and then I hate on it. That's my strategy So four hours later Scott comes back and I'm of course still playing this really terrible stupid game And I see him making himself look like a moron I'm like, I will never do that in my life and he's like you have to try it And I'm like, I guess I have to try it so I can make fun of it. Yes So I try it so let's give it a little bit So this is a mod chip for a PlayStation one I bought a ps1 that year for the sole purpose of playing Dance Dance Revolution in my own apartment In fact Dance Dance Revolution wasn't even available in the US. So I needed a mod chip and I had to get the game somehow They weren't even easy to import. This was a day before you could just download stuff Well, you could download stuff for me Napster had died, but there were other methods especially on an RIT campus But there was no private tour. It didn't exist. So I bought a PlayStation one without ever even turning it on I cracked it open soldered this thing into a went to Red Octane and said I want Dance Dance Revolution Now Red Octane you guys know them from their more recent games. How many people know who Red Octane is? Okay, people should know Red Octane was basically the Netflix of video games before Netflix even really existed a lot Now what they really were is you would get a PlayStation one disc of an import game Copy it with your $400 CD burner and play it on your mod chip PlayStation No, it's worth noting that in the entire time that I own that PlayStation only one non Dance Dance Revolution game was ever put into this thing. That was a ISO of Mega Man Legends I downloaded just to see if I'd broken it after I started the mod chip in I think I played G Darius on it once. The point there is That this game was really stupid and it really actually was one of the greatest games we'd ever played at the Shore in Wildwood, New Jersey. This is back in the most disgusting place middle 2000s when Dance Dance Revolution and our cage We're still like going really strong There were like 20 DDR machines on this boardwalk in Jersey and we would dance there and there would be crowds of people watching There'd be this really crazy community. That actually is us in Wildwood as of this year There are no DDR machines in Wildwood not one. There's I think there was one pumping up machine and one broken in the groove machine Okay So we started thinking about this that no one really talks about Dance Dance Revolution in the modern era of game design And in fact, the only time it came up and what kind of inspired us to do this panel was at the lat two packs ago It was it was a few packs ago and this some panel I don't know if they still have it here where they get a bunch of game journalists And they have like a ranking of like best 10 games and like each journalist can make like one move on the list They'd be like I would add Counter-Strike because it was the first game like that ever which wasn't true And what's his name Chris Hecker this five-party guy I think he goes up and he's like DDR number four and me and remember like And everyone else is like And we're like there's a problem here right if we're the me rim and Chris Hecker are the only smart people in this room full of game journalists Let's try to fix this with a 20 minute panel now We're not saying DDR is the best game ever. It's not it's not a perfect game But people don't talk about it and I realize something very important respect thinking about this Is that I was looking through my own life of games that were really important to me that like really influenced me as a player As a designer as a guy who talks shit about games in front of people like inventions and one I noticed that I really like the sequels didn't do to point to save two tribes to But to DDR came into my life about the same time that Counter-Strike did and what did I play right before? I got on the plane to packs Counter-Strike. What is to this day the most popular game on steam? Counter-Strike so DDR. I've been playing just as long and yet. I've never lectured about it I've never talked about it. I've never even really analyzed it other than I got really good at it as a player And that's not our thing. We like to analyze stuff. So we start inside it. Let's talk about this So dance dance revolution The game just plays you I mean if you're not familiar with it I'll skip a slide for a second. It's just a machine with arrows and you follow what the arrows do All right now see when you actually start playing DDR you've just started you've never played it before you're looking at the arrows And your conscious brain is trying to say there's an up arrow step on the up There's a right arrow step on the right, but once you're good at it. You're there's no conscious thought right? It's the arrows just go by and your legs just move And it's like if some person was controlling which arrows showed up It's like they'd be controlling your legs like you're a puppet The game is playing you and once you're trained in the art of DDR the game plays you and it's simply a matter of how Well, are you trained how fast to your legs? How big are your lungs? Can you play the expert game or will you break because you're a crappy puppet? So what is it about DDR we're gonna talk about DDR like it's special. It's not special It's just that we want to worth makes plus is special We want to really dive deep on this one game really talk about why it's different from other kinds of rhythm games now Here was one of many the money games This is a very rough timeline because actually it was all long enough ago in the late 90s that I couldn't find reliably accurate Actual release dates for all these games. Yeah, I have conflicting information all over the place I have to really know is that Konami has a series of games called be money Which is named be money because it was beat mania was sort of the first one mostly right mania is a sort of pretend you're a DJ game and right around the same time they pop in music which is We'll talk about pop music Guitar freaks, which was this crazy idea that you can have a fake guitar and play along with the music in the 90s I said, I feel like a game came out again. I feel like there's also been sort of games like, you know beat mania come out Also. Yeah. Oh, there was also keyboard freaks or keyboard mania. I feel what it was called drum mania drum mania So rock band seems to have come out a long time ago Interesting thing all those arcade machines. So this guitar game this keyboard game this drum game These are physical arcade machines You could connect them all together and rock band really existed like for real it was designed to do that in the 90s So DDR came out of that but DDR is sort of conceived like it's basic premise was that you were dancing on a stage You have four arrows Now look at the design of this machine think about it from a psychological perspective. It's imposing. It's big It definitely it has a stage that is separate from the actual machine itself So it basically makes sure that there is kind of a space around it Yeah, when you area when you have a gallery machine or like a miss Pac-Man machine It stands up and it's self-contained thing It doesn't spill out into the arcade in front of it, right? So you can walk past it and avoid it when there's a DDR machine It's like everywhere. It's like grabbing you with its big pad-like arms and metal bars Right in addition to that right if you notice at the top of the machine next to the sort of you know Big thing that says DDR. There's freaking stage lights that blink and flash out all over the place Like you're actually at a club or on a stage It's got these huge speakers which aren't actually that powerful the pro people at the good arcade would plug in tiny Those speakers that were a thousand times better, but those things look really big The game is also constantly making noise. You know all arcade machines have the sort of attention gather I catch It's like hey, come play my game make a loud noise and scare a kid Well the eye-catch on this game was actually arrows going by showing you how to play the game Now what's interesting is that you can just get up on the stage without putting a quarter in and follow those arrows You can play DDR on the pad without ever putting a quarter It wouldn't register your score You wouldn't get to finish a song the music wouldn't really be playing along with the arrows But you can see the arrows and you could stand on the pad all you wanted if you weren't you know No one else is playing and sort of try it out see what it was like to stand up there You know and you go up to a pac-man machine. It's sort of you can see what it's like to move the joystick In fact a lot of times I would play because I was a four-point college kid Someone who put a quarter in to play solo on one of these two pads And I was kind of get up there and do the dance next to him You wouldn't get a score, but he's still you know He could look at the left side arrows and you get sort of a free play So if you look at the game itself, it is just arrows. It's just saying up down left right But there's a lot of subtlety and design going on here for one these arrows if you see it looks like they're all different colors They're actually not they're all the same color, but they're shifting They're scintillating through a series of colors based on what beat they're on so they're always the same color when they get to The top so you can add a glance see the flow of quarter notes eighth notes 16th notes all the craziness In addition these arrows at the top they show you orders when you're supposed to step when the arrow You step on that arrow those arrows pulse With the beat of music everything pulses these humbos as you're getting a combo that little perfect Just keeps going like pulse pulse pulse when you step on the up and bigger and bigger until the dude says 100 combo and then you screw up and you lose right when you step on the up arrow The up arrow at the top of the screen gets big at the same time So you can make that get big at the same time as the arrow in front of it is in front of it Like you're eating the arrow that's approaching now What else is going on here? You'll notice that there's score and the scores are fairly similar But one of these guys is playing in basic mode and the other one's playing on a more difficult mode They're not dancing to the same arrows, but at the same song One of the most interesting game mechanics of DDR that is very rarely replicated is that it's two players Simultaneous on a screen and yet two players can have completely different difficulty levels. I I consider myself an expert DDR I'm super good because you know 10 years you better be good at a game by that in 12 years. I'm 12 years I still can't play Counter-Strike all right I can play DDR with any of you on the same song the same pad and you will get a different set of arrows They'll spit to the same music and we'll just play just fine We'll still compete we'll both feel like we're contributing if I fail the song and the game is gonna end You can keep me going and vice versa So the game really really encourages you to play with other people even if there's no Possible way for you to compete on a direct skill level. Does counter-strike do that? No Well counter-strike you're going against someone's your difficulty is set by who the other guy is right in DDR You're both sort of playing against the computer or against your computer playing against yourself Can you do it but I am playing against you as well because I'm trying to get a higher score Yeah, and if you are on easy mode and you you know do better and you do perfect on easy mode And I sort of fail at hard mode. You will have a higher score than me. That's just how it works So another really interesting thing about this game is that they rated all the songs now this radar came later But the game has always had this concept of feet as in you have a foot rating for a song And this foot rating tells you how difficult the song is to play I don't know who in Konami designed this rating or actually dance these songs But you can tell they designed it after a jukebox right and that's sort of also the design of the machine is like you go in and you Select your music and you're spinning through the songs and you know pick you get to hear this a preview of the song when you stop On it for a little while and then you can pick it out if you like it and they added also You know the radar he was talking about which tells you what kind of difficult the song is But even before that these foot ratings the differences between it three foot four foot five foot were very very well Designed the game taught you how to play in a way that very few games do it sort of intuitively draws you like in a Basic song with like four feet. It's all just quarter notes But every now and then there's like one eighth note you go to the next level And there'll be like a few eighth notes here in there and the game just like progressively gets more difficult But in this very very controlled fashion much like how in a man-man game They show you an obstacle and give you kind of an easy way to get around it And then later the same obstacle helps and it's much more difficult, but it's not a surprise I've seen it before I saw that purple arrow the first time on what the hell and I missed it And I was like, oh, I guess it's a quarter note and then when there were two of them I was able to step on so Mega Man and VR share a lot in terms of the way they teach you how to play themselves The stage itself is Super high quality and metal if I had time we'd show you some videos of people who you know They don't play for the perfect score. They play to not fail the song and they dance they dance really well This used to be a big thing in conventions like about a decade ago And the fact that the you know they engineered it such that like all the arrows were at the same level as the metal around them It wasn't like they were recessed or sticking out and you had to click them in words, right? It's just you were just dancing on a floor It just so happened that a few of the floor tiles were sort of magical floor tiles And it sort of reminds you of like, you know walking down the street and trying to like step in between the crash Right only some of the tiles, you know, it's almost like an Indiana Jones situation You don't want to set the trap off only you do. Yep Now an interesting kind of aside is that in like HCI human interface design with computers that whole like field of study There's that even affordance meaning if something in your design you it will afford Someone who's interacting with your design certain capabilities whether or not you intend them to have them or not If I make a glass bus stop one affordance of that is that I can smash the glass If I make a wooden one inside instead what affordance is that I can spray paint on the wood in DVR They had this bar on the back of the machine. It was designed so you wouldn't fall off the machine and hurt yourself But some players would grab onto this thing in order to look like a doofus So it's sort of a case study there and then if you're ever designing a game your players might use the elements Introduce into the game for situations that you might not have anticipated or for reasons you never would have expected or wanted and You don't want anyone looking like a doofus So let's compare DVR to a couple of other games because this is where the differences and what's interesting about DVR to really stand out Just tell the tale about Alright, so poppin music is a rhythm game where there are I think seven or eight buttons Maybe nine there's a whole bunch of big ones, right? You hit them right and basically this little lines going up the screen a lot like rock band or whatever And you just have to hit the buttons That's all you do is hit the buttons you stand there and you go tickity tickity tickity tickity They came out slightly before that sense for Lucius one of these Bimani games Yeah And you hit them sort of in rhythm with the music and they're in the orchestrate You know where the lines show up to go with whatever song it happens to be and there's been a lot of versions of poppin music They still bring one out every year like clockwork in Japan is sort of crazy So we're Kazukan one time and Kazukan unlike Pax has an all-night game room 24-7 you just stay in there and 3 a.m Still gaming and it was not okay. So we had arcade machines in this room Right someone had set up a poppin music in the corner and this one guy really liked it for some reason It was also really good at it Which made you think he had it at home Why was he wasting his time at Kazukan playing it especially when no one was around at three in the morning? But he just played poppin music literally non-stop all night never ending. He smelled really bad. Oh Boy It's like what is this guy doing if you just really wanted that guy to go away He did not go away the whole time and the next year we're still like is that the same guy It was totally the same guy at the same pop just came back to Kazukan for another year to play poppin music again I was like alright you guys someone has to switch that game out with something else So poppin music to that guy was just as important as DDR is to us yet I think poppin music is dumb as a person. I don't like poppin music that guy clearly had no interest in playing DDR because there was a DDR machine there too What are the differences between poppin music and DDR? One DDR analogizes a real-world thing. You are at least nominally dancing if this is what you think dancing is Some people are actually dancing when they play DDR some people aren't playing DDR or dancing I don't know what they're doing But at least there is an analogy. Poppin music the analogy is not even there You are just hitting buttons There is not even at least DJ hero or you know beat mania It's like okay You think you're being a DJ some I guess there is some DJ equipment that maybe looks like that there's a little turntable right? This is not analogous to anything in the real world. It's not even a plastic guitar. It's just plastic now It is still a game of very high skill. I try to play poppin music and then I creamed me and The thing is let's talk about this from a spectator perspective People would gather around and while it would New Jersey like I showed before and watch someone playing DDR Most of those people had never seen DDR before or if they had they didn't know anything about it DDR was a spectator sport to experts who would be looking at the feet of the players and watching what they were doing And also looking at the screen of the Arabs and it was a spectator sport to people who didn't understand what DDR was The game itself was a spectacle kind of like how even if you don't understand anything that's going on in hockey You can understand a fist fight But if you go over there and you watch the League of Legends You don't know how that game works everyone in the whole room is gonna go Oh like they did a few minutes ago and you're just like what happened guy So poppin music is an amazing spectator sport if you are a poppin music do but DDR is a spectator sport to anyone So what about this kind of more recent genre of rhythm games? I like to call them the touch and drag genre Now these are not spectators sports. No one's gonna watch you on your iPad go like this Except creepy They also don't analogize anything now They can be fun games and they can trigger other elements for example the nostalgia version of this genre a lot of people love this game Even though it's really not much different from this which is really not much different from this They are rhythm games. We're not saying they're not we're not trying to pull some sort of no true You have to push buttons to a rhythm or do something, you know in time to a beat. That's a rhythm game All right, it's not much you can say about it, but if you want to talk about rhythm games I mean look at FPS's how different is planet side from counter strike from quake one from day use X FPS's are this completely amazing range of things yet most people today when they think of rhythm game either think of rock band or Think of this stuff How to find what about rhythm games that are just straight up other games that just use rhythm as a driving element or as a mechanic within the game So it's such a wide genre DDR really Stands apart from all of them not that it's better as I keep saying just that it's different and it's unique You can even think of like the resident evil like you know action Action things as sort of a rhythm game, right? It says press a press a DDR says step up. You step up So that was about 20 minutes of meandering. Where are we going with this? If you care about games at all you need to try out all kinds of games If you say you're a gamer and you've never even tried like doom 2 well What kind of gamer are you know if you're a game journalist or a game designer shame on you not saying doom 2 is the greatest game I'm not saying doom 2 holds up to modern games A lot of people hate Castlevania 2, but you at least got to understand where all these old games came from and You know look at all those mechanics. I talked about I could go on for hours about the mechanics of DDR A lot of people they're only looking at a few genres. They're only looking at one kind of game Maybe only the kind of game they're interested in it's like DDR is getting no respect and that's just one example of an entire genre of games that people just aren't even given two craps about So don't knock something till you try Now you've used this fan arc here because there's two things in here that you should not knock until you have tried Right someone told you look at ponies, and you're like there's no way that my little pony cartoon is good Someone told me DDR is good. Oh wait yet is someone told me to play DDR I can react it to both of them the same way that is stupid I'm going to play this or watch this so that I can then make fun of you and Now I'm waiting very expected me for the new season of my little pony, and I still play DDR almost every day to this day But most important We're from the internet all of us are from the internet here Once you've tried something Wait if you want to crack all over someone's game if you understand their game You know if you hate say here's a newer League of Legends one of those games the first thing the anti-hater is gonna come at you with Right, we're telling you how to be a better hater if you're hating on do you want to hate on something maybe I guess League of Legends I pick on you you're across the hallway right you come picking on League of Legends The first thing that League of Legends gonna the guy is gonna say is have you played it? And if the answer is no you're done right so if you want to hate on DDR So that's the stupidest thing enrolled you gotta play it first then hate on it