DPS Report - Dance Dance Revolution

DPS Report
10/19/2016
Dance Dance Revolution

I know one thing above all else:
It has been far too long since I written one of these.

With the success of the ARG, Pokemon Go, and the brute force marketing of VR, I believe it's only appropriate that I take some time to look at and discuss what I'm going to call “full body gaming”. That is, digital video games that require all or most of a player's body to interact within the game. Pokemon Go of course relies on the players to actually walk around outside (no surprise it's popularity matched that of a gym membership after New Years) and VR requiring everything from upper body movement to total body movement. For this reason I think Dance Dance Revolution makes an excellent case study for some of the strengths and weaknesses of any full body genre, especially one that lives and dies by it's peripherals.

If you're reading this, you are probably of an age that remembers DDR. Maybe you even used to go to contests at local arcades or just liked to play at home for exercise. But if you somehow missed the phenomenon DDR was a game that attempted to simulate dancing using a large “dance pad” that would hook into your console. The pad had four directional buttons on it's surface that you would step on in time with the on screen cues and the music. The music was catchy (often being dance remixes of popular songs and really obscure dance titles), succeeding felt good, and the difficulty curve was actually really solid. The tech was old, anyone who played Hyper Olympic on the NES would be familiar with it, and was really responsive. 20 years is usually enough time to get a peripheral working pretty well. The game's price was about what you would expect at the time and the graphics weren't exactly advanced, but the colors were pretty. It was addictive. However, you may notice that it's not really as popular as it once was. In a way, it's life span was a precursor to the likes of Guitar Hero.

What DDR did right:
It's hard getting players to move around. Most games that try to encourage motion controls are clunky and inaccurate, and many other dance titles also failed to deliver the responsiveness that players have come to expect from their games. Dance Dance Revolution nailed it. It felt good to tap your foot in the right place at the right time; seeing the arrows explode with an immediate feedback popping up telling you just how accurate you were. Really, it was more of a rhythm game than a dance one, but that was what made all the difference. The music was catchy, the graphics were loud and active like a dance club but the on screen prompts were super readable and the background wasn't distracting. Everything about the game was made to make you forget about how ridiculous you might look and perhaps just as importantly made any spectators you had much more interested in watching the screen instead of watching you; so they were never discouraged from playing. When you think about it, this really was quite a feat.
The controls were also super simple and intuitive. There were four directions on the screen, and four directions at your feet. The symbols were consistent, intuitive, and responsive. The difficulty curve was designed to teach you how to play; not how to get good. This was critical. The easiest mode landed you mostly on the down beats, sometimes only on half or full notes. It taught the player how to coordinate their movements with the on screen prompts, what each arrow meant, and how many mistakes they could make without losing (a lot!). The difficult would ramp when the player would set the difficulty, and each song was more fun to dance to the harder the setting, so the player always wanted to push themselves naturally.

What DDR could have improved:
You may have already considered the strong correlation this game has with the likes of Guitar Hero or Rock Band. A pretty rhythm game with an exclusive peripheral that released dozens of iterations and suddenly vanished. Why?
The most obvious answer is the inherent difficulty in building upon a system like this. Guitar Hero/Rock Band got around this for awhile by adding vocals, bass, and drums, but DDR didn't have the luxury of adding “back up dancers” (although there was a two player mode). While it was updating it's tracks, adding more music, slightly better graphics, and new dances all the time; the core game remained the same. If you played the first DDR you played all of them. It was as simple as that. This inability to build upon itself and innovate new ways of interacting with this system is a death sentence for any series or genre.

So what could DDR have done to save itself?
I don't know for sure, but I have some ideas. I do know that if we as an industry don't consider these things than VR and ARGs will fail before the same pitfalls as it's predecessors. Let's start by looking at the fundamental components of DDR. We have a four directional game pad and on screen prompts. Forget the music. Forget the dance. You're not really dancing anyways. You're playing a rhythm game with your feet. It's an unfamiliar place. But you know what is familiar? Platformers. In particular, endless runners. What if DDR had taken a new and entirely different twist by being an endless runner that required you to follow the on screen prompts to move on? Now, to be interesting the player would have to be able to make unique decisions during a run which would require them to think instead of react. This goes against the fundamental state of mind a player is normally in during DDR. So perhaps complex reactionary runs would be separated by stages with simpler foot work, but varying paths. So the player doesn't have to try so hard to implement a step series correctly so much as decide which series to go with.
You know what other genre relies on players to straddle the line of zen-like reaction and critical strategy that is also very closely related to dance? Fighting games. Capoeira is already a dance/fight hybrid and players have to remember complex motions to perform special moves in fighting games all the time. So what if the player would choose fighting characters who danced during the fight? The player would have a series of on screen prompts to follow just to maintain their health bar, but then there would be “free dance” moments in which all the player has to do is hit their dance set accurately. Something from a preset move list that includes the timing and directional pads. The accuracy of the move improves it's power, but the opposing player would be granted an opportunity to counter it with a very difficult on screen prompt. Most accurate dancer wins the match.
Of course, if Minecraft has taught us anything, it's the players want to play games their way, and any game that allows for more creative freedom is always going to do well. So what about something far simpler than anything mentioned above? What is DDR allowed a “make your own dance” mode. Choose a song from a list and design your own dance for it and upload it for others to try. Like Super Mario Maker but for DDR.

All of these could have been great ways to innovate. They could have also been terrible death sentences. But not innovating on a genre will always kill it, taking a risk only might.