Dance Dance Revolution DVD Game: A Video Review

“AMUSEMENT GAMING” Professionals are Officially Morons

The news in brief, once again secondarily reported from excerpts of The Stinger Report.

At the recent ATEI gaming trade show in London, two new dance games were displayed:  DDRX and Pump it Up: Absolute.  While reading through the report, these two excerpts caught my eye:

“During the show, the machine was overrun by the leading Dancing Stage fan players from across the internet. ATEI’09 had worked with Stinger Report owners KWP to come up with a comprehensive plan to deal with the Non-Trade problem at the show. Though it is impossible to hold back the tsunami of fan players interested in the latest BeMani titles, a need to manage the needs to promote the game and to sell the game (without a hoard of sweating players) proved an interesting challenge.”

“On the UDC booth the company had the highly anticipated ‘Pump It Up!: NX Absolute’ (PC Hardware) – the game was mobbed by fans of the dancing stage title during the show.”

Let me be the first, and perhaps only person to say: WTF.  Two things catch my attention here.  First, a horde of sweaty players?  That’s awesome.  A special Infinity Injun shoutout to S34n, who was among those sweaty players, and who I can only assume was one of the first people to have to deal with the retarded cultural logistics programme these morons apparently decided to implement.

Second of all, is the entire industry collectively retarded?  If you operate an arcade, of all the factors you could possibly know about a game, which is more important:  that it uses a USB memory stick to store player data, that it has a 37 inch screen or, oh yeah, that “it is impossible to hold back the tsunami of fan players”?

One of these things is not like the other.  Maybe the only reason arcades are dying is because operators don’t actually know how to run a business.

-Kilroy Del Dancefighter Economist the First

Towards a New Tourneyfaggotry

Dedicated readers of the Injun will no doubt be familiar with my long and illustrious music gaming career.  It was a good long run, I think.  I wish it to last longer still, but that’s a matter of the community and not of my own desires.  Between the scarcity of popular tournament music games in Colorado, the cost of out of state tournaments, and my status as persona non grata within Colorado for my various misadventures, I’m not sure there’s much left for me in the music gaming scene.  Still, at least I didn’t ever let a loss put me on permanent tilt, as I’ve seen so clearly from certain members of the community.  I lasted as long as I could with what I had.  My soul still burns for competition, however.  Hence I’ve been trying to make the slow, painful transition to other forms of sport. TKD,

I took up TKD again a semester ago, after something like an 8 year hiatus.  This despite largescale consensus that the art is useless at the highest levels of competition.  Given my competitive background this ought to turn me off of it.  The reason it hasn’t reduces to two principal reasons.  The first is very straightforward.  It’s cheap, and it’s close to my house.  As a professional plasma donor there’s sadly only so much I can afford to take up.  The second is more convoluted.  It might be called nostalgia.

I remember the early days of the Colorado DDR scene (or rather the mid-days, but whatever, that’s when I showed up so I’ll call it what I will).  Those were the days when bar use was not only thoroughly frowned upon, but also completely unheard of in actual competition.  Nobody did it, and part of it stemmed from the earnest belief that the no-bar player could beat the bar user.  This spirit never fully went away in Colorado, and indeed even at this late stage of the community I can count on one hand the number of people who make a habit of bar use.

TKD play feels like those early days.  More importantly, it’s a base.  I started my music gaming experience with habits that didn’t translate well to high level competition.  Playing at all, however, helped me to gain the experience necessary to eventually transition to high level play.

However I haven’t let such nostalgia stop me from beginning to train in something that’s considered more sound at higher levels.  As of yesterday I’ve taken up Judo as well.  I expect it will take quite some time before I see any measurable return from either of these endeavors.  Indeed it will be a while before I can even live train during Judo at all.  I suppose it is as it should be, though.

This is perhaps supported by the fact that warmups for Judoka apparently consist of doing GodHand style backflips across the gym mat.  Such aerobic activities are so far beyond me the chief instructor had to step in, concerned either about my wellbeing or about the possibility of someone slipping on the excessive sweat I left behind.

Perhaps finding a job other than professional plasma donor will help.  I will have to look.

My only real fear, however, is that I do not know how much energy I really have left.  I outlived the Colorado music gaming scene, it seems, but is that because of my vitality, or the lack of vitality amongst my competitors?  When I was first learning music games, I was studying Sociology.  This essentially consisted of not studying at all.  Hence I had as much free time as I needed to play and get better at music games.  I burned out on Sociology after realizing how trivial it was; will my desire to transition a more legitimate field (programming) ironically sap my ability to become competitive at things?  I suppose time will tell; time is at the heart of this whole thing, I think.

On that note, I am at Mazo’s house right now.  Despite being entered in breaking, forms, and sparring events at a TKD tournament less than a month away, I neglected my training tonight in order to watch a video (and recover from terribly sore knees, but the former sounds funnier).  I have embedded it in its 1.5 hour long entirety right here in the middle of the article, for your convenience, or inconvenience.  Whichever you least desire I suppose.

Mazo and I had a discussion of countless lengthy seconds on why the competitive Starcraft scene is so much more substantial than the competitive music gaming scene.  He brought up some good points.  Part of it, he suggested, was that Starcraft is a game in which players compete directly against each other; their actions affect the circumstances other players must respond to within the game.  In DDR, PIU, ITG and all that, a player is ostensibly just playing for high score, against the game itself; the presence of the other player on the pad is borderline irrelevent.

Perhaps part of it as well is that Starcraft is a game of strategy, whereas music games are principally a game of skill.  That is to say, you only ever need to do one thing, you just need to do it well, and consistently, and you’ll win.  Thinking along these lines has raised a number of curious considerations.  I have traditionally disapproved of classic pump tournament rules, which graded based on combo.  This is because this method of grading subtracts from the role raw skill plays in winning.  The question to me now is, does it substitute strategy in its place?  I will be playing in a classic pump tournament in April, and you can expect to hear my impressions on this subject at that point.

In fact, it strikes me just how different most competitive games really are from the DDR and ITG tournaments I grew up with.  I have a long ways to go yet if I am to make anything of myself in any of these new games.  We will have to see if I make it.

Against My Wisest Counsel…

why

Deadly Irony at Sporktoberfest

So Colorado is kind of mediocre in terms of dance game players.  To give you some perspective, I am basically ok at these games in terms of Colorado players.  That’s really saying something.  As Sporktoberfest approached, this represented my most recent “accomplishment”:

Check out that beautiful MA

So I’m terrible, and going into the tournament I know I’m terrible.  By the end of the tournament, however, after a number of things and such have occured…

…no, I’m still terrible.  I managed to beat Spork in DDR, twice.  Once on singles, once on doubles.  I didn’t beat out Spork for first in Doubles though and I didn’t even place in singles.  I guess what I’m trying to say is, the irony of Sporktoberfest was how terrible Spork was at the game.

I remember years ago and the business that was the infamous Gillete Wyoming tournament, and looking back on that now I feel a profound sense of longing for Colorado to never end up that way.  Competitive skill is a relative measurement, you have to work just to stay in the same place as your opponents.  Colorado has become lazy.  Colorado is an at-risk state for becoming like Wyoming.

Oh, and it doesn’t really even mean anything to place in a DDR tournament because everyone ranges in the low SDG’s on everything less than a 10, so you could just as easily flip a coin as play a match to determine who would have won.  Meanwhile the ITG machine was half broken (another sign of Sporks negligence to what is, ostensibly, the thing he has dedicated most of his life to) and the ITG tournament featured 6 people.  You might say the future of the competitive scene in Colorado will stem from the spirit of those 6 people, if it does at all.  Too bad two of them are universally hated, and two are intrinsically lazy.  Good luck Marq and Maxx!

Here are some assorted pictures.  Let their chaotic, contextually schizophrenic, arbitrary nature represent the state of the current community, something that exists independently of any competitive or achievement loving spirit.

A swiss-cheese overview of the Bemani Community, and the like

So I guess I’ve waited long enough for our furry friend and will have to give my final proclamations about MGD3 independently of his watchful eye.  Hopefully this won’t permanently bias my perception, but if it does then that’s cool too, I guess.  He probably would have just docked it for having too much heterosexual furry sex anyways.

So the past year, and even the past month specifically, have seen some interesting developments in the world of music games.  Pump Pro was released, Mungyodance 3 yiffed its way into existence, ITG Rebirth finally came together, and WinDEU managed to get his ass onto the development team for all three, somehow.  I’m going to talk about a lot of things in this article.  Maybe even too many.  In the meantime though, let me give you a brief assessment of all three.

Pump Pro is my favorite of the three, and not just because I’m the best in my state at it.  It addressed a major problem I had with other Pump games by replacing their combo based scoring system with an accuracy based scoring system and marginally stricter timing windows.  The result is something like a cross between classic Pump and ITG; which of course means that most competitive Pump players hate it because they can’t time and have developed their style of play entirely around comboing things, and most DDR players hate it because it has strict timing, 16th runs, and very complex crossovers.  ITG players are split; some of them hate it just because of the extra panel, some because it reminds them that ITG is dead.

It should make sense that Pro is reminescent of ITG because it was designed and developed by the same people, operating in conjunction with Andamiro as they have been historically known to do in an effort to screw over Konami.  Pro runs on the 4.0 build of Stepmania built into either a dedicab, or sold as an upgrade for existing Pump cabinets.  Some people still have hangups about Stepmania based arcade rhythm games in general.  This is something I’ll get to later.

Pro is great because it has, well, strict timing, 16th runs, and very complex crossovers.  It’s something new to conquer, and its conventions, though not universal throughout the game, are rule based.  That’s good to see, on a certain level (maybe not a competitive level; we’ll get to that).  It basically means that shuffling every chart in the game would force a completely different style of play than simply playing the charts as given, which isn’t the case for some music games.  Techniques are pretty much implicit in the charts, and hence a good chart can be discerned from a not-so-good one just by the methods that the player is forced or otherwise persuaded to use in order to play it or play it well.  What I’m basically saying is that a bad chart is one that deviates from the established rules of composition without establishing any new, reasonable ones.  Pro follows pretty uniform rules with its stepcharts.

Of course, this might also be a sign of the infancy of 5 panel games, but this isn’t that big of a problem for me, and I’ll get to this in a bit.

MUNGYODANCE 3.  Well, I suppose the two things that immediately spring to mind are the major aspects of the game, the steps and the gameplay mechanics, and the third thing that springs to mind is how the release of a stepmania pack of all the songs in the game makes the second thing that sprung to mind not so important anymore.  So let me talk about the second thing first, that way I’ve said something about it before it (rightfully) fades from memory.

Mungyodance 3 is also built on Stepmania, although they opted to remove timing altogether.  Why, I’ll never know, but MGD3 is strictly combo based.  Unlike classic pump, it doesn’t even have timing categories.  In that sense it might be said to share more in common with Guitar Hero or Rock Band than any traditional dance game, but the timing windows actually seem looser, and there is quite a bit less complexity possible with 4 panels as opposed to with any instrument you would find in either aforementioned game (except perhaps vocals, lulz).  Additionally, instead of a lifebar there is a numeric life system which deducts 1 life for every NC and adds one for both every 50 step combo and every freeze held.  This system is very questionably conceived, for a very simple reason: both placement of and quantity of freezes per chart is not a uniform factor.  As a hilarious result, there are charts where a plethora of freezes will shoot you up to 100 life and you can literally walk off the pad after playing 2/3rds of the song.  I don’t know if anyone has noticed this or done this, or even if anyone would want to, but within the context of the game mechanics it is strictly speaking a possibility.

As to the charts themselves, after having played all the new content in MGD3 and most of the stuff from 1 and 2, this is my assessment.  There are a number of very traditional stepcharts, which use steps sparingly, mostly in the the 4th and 8th denominations, turn selectively, leave downtime between streams, etc.  Most of these are solid.  Then there are very eccentric stepcharts; these aren’t just limited to expirimentals, mind you, although those are the most self-conscious and so I appreciate a lot of them better.  This includes joke files like the Dash Hopes series (the Another for Dash Hopes 3 is outstanding, btw).  It also includes stepcharts that use gimmicks like a constant BPM shift to force an artificial wave (not a new technique, for those of you who have really been paying attention to stepchartistry over the years), and that have step patterns which force highly sophisticated and hence uncommon techniques, like triples and quads placed in streams.  These are going to be harder for your average player to enjoy.

There is one other special thing about MGD3 worth noting.  Mines have been replaced with “mod-bombs”.  These are a unique if somewhat eccentric addition.  They don’t actually subtract from health.  In some charts, such as Nobody Likes the Records, I get the impression a mod bomb is actually intended to be hit as part of the song.  Naturally in the SM version these are replaced by actual mines, so they lose a little bit of something.  Probably not enough to cry over though.

However, there are also charts which include triples and quads and hands and such while being pretty bland in general.  I’m afraid this actually constitutes many of the charts.  I think the people that stepped MGD3 might have been suffering from collective A.D.D. because probably 80% of the charts are stepped purely and entirely to the most active song element of any given part of a song, with little to no downtime between streams.  So the bassline will be 8th notes at the beginning of the song, and the steps will go to it, then vocals and synth will kick in.  If the synth is just a humming it will be ignored and the vocals will be stepped, if the synth is a 16th rhythm the steps will favor that, even if it’s 50% softer than every other song element and hence harder to actually focus on.  The Drum and Bass folder is very generic on the whole.

Now let me just say, that I don’t think that’s even necessarily a bad way to step something.  In fact my tastes are ridiculously simple with stepcharts typically, to the point they might even seem hypocritical in light of other opinions of mine.  If I get in an argument about music and someone says that Schoenberg is great because 12-tonal is a brilliant way of blah-blah-blah, I tell them I don’t think dissonance constitutes a music style and to take their dodecaphony and shove it.  With stepcharts, I’ll pretty much defend anything as long as the artist seemed to have an intention behind what they were doing, even if it was a terrible one.  I mean hell, I made stuff like this because I thought it was funny.  And while it is true that I’m a horrible person (and we’ll get to that later), I’m actually starting to think I’m more consistent than I realized.  A joke is funny once, and maybe hysterical twice, but stretch it on forever and it wears thin.  There were too damn many stepcharts in MGD3, and most of them weren’t novel or entertaining.  The steps didn’t do anything for me that the music wouldn’t have done by itself, and most of them reminded me of each other.  The exceptions were great, but they kind of drowned in all the content; I’ll take a Timebomb or a The Big Orange Love over Cutie Chaser Morning Mix or a Baby Baby Give Me Your Love, but if you ask me to name as many songs as I could from the game I probably wouldn’t get to 30.  Out of 300+, that’s kind of not a lot.

If you want to play something from MGD, just download the stepmania pack, find the stuff you like, and delete the rest.  To give you a head start, the in-house music can be pretty safely ignored.  The IDM folder has in my opinion the best ratio of hits to misses, although there are some pretty big misses.

Alright, ITG Rebirth.  This was extremely solid.  As you should either know or be able to tell, it’s a fan project designed to make a song pack to play in Stepmania, and on R21 machines, in the vein of the ITG series.  In that capacity, it’s somewhat mixed.  On the whole it is much more crossover heavy than ITG ever was.  I don’t have a problem with this, but I’m sure there are people already whining because people tend to enjoy that.  ITG rebirth actually makes a mistake that MGD3 didn’t, in that it has a number of charts which start before the customary measure or two of song time to give the player an idea of what they will be doing.  This is easier to look past, though, because even with that little unconvention, most of the offending charts aren’t terrible, and the ratio of hits to misses is still pretty good (although it has much less content than MGD3.  On that note it’s pretty impressive that I can’t remember any charts from MGD3 that did that; or it’s a sign of how unmemorable the game was).  I think there is like, one 14 footer in the pack, and maybe a handful of things harder than 12.  So the distribution of difficulty follows the pyramid structure, just like ITG did, although the myths about the game seem to be growing exponentially to the point that I one day expect it to be common knowledge that every ITG chart had 64th rhythms at 200+ BPM.

Two experts discussing ITG

The steps are generally very ITG like in terms of rhythm and overall structure.  16ths will be used to complement certain elements of a song and not others (depending on difficulty at least) so that there is a diversity of patterns and the structure of the stepchart isn’t perfectly symmetrical with the structure of the song.  They seemed to have been constructed with an idea of their performance in mind, which as I said, is something I can appreciate.  Now that I think about it, it seems like MGD3 is the game that the overwhelming number of DDR players seem to think ITG was; gimmick heavy and hyperactive, which makes its popularity all the more confusing and appalling to me.  Blame the lack of timing windows?  I don’t know.

Rebirth is sound.  There are some gimmicks, but they can be appreciated as all of them are there for a reason.  They attempt to force novel techniques.  There doesn’t even seem to be any forced heel-toeing in Rebirth, as distinct from Mungyodance.  There are charts which heel-toeing would dominate, but it isn’t necessary to pass anything.  My only real problem with Rebirth were most of the things dragon (and Draigun) related.  Blame the furries?  Hell Yeah.

So that’s all that Jazz.  Now for the issues of Stepmania, 5 panel, and my epic degree of elitism.

OK, so most people remember that dance and music games started out with big companies and proprietary tech and hardware systems, even if they started playing DDR Extreme and not DDR 1st mix like a proper 16th hating 200-pound DDRFREAK moderator.  Of those people, most of them use and know of Stepmania as a simulator.  So the idea is that Stepmania is an imitation of DDR (and of Pump, and all the other game types it came to support), and a lot of people can’t get that out of their head.  It didn’t go away when 600,000 bajillion fan charts got uploaded to Bemanistyle, or when Arch0wl and friends first started making “keyboard” specific files.  It sure as hell didn’t go away when ITG came out running on Stepmania.  Pretty much nothing that followed from that ever made it go away, and it probably never will.

What I think these people are missing is an organic sense of these games.  DDR 3rd mix ran on different hardware than DDR MAX, had different gameplay mechanics, a different framerate, and even a different scoring system.  Still, no one questions the legitimacy of DDR Max as a progression from DDR 3rd mix.  When it comes right down to it, Stepmania does the same damn thing as proprietary DDR software.  It makes 4 arrows scroll up a god damn screen in time to god damn music until some god damn input is received which registers a given value in relation to time, culminating in an aggregate total value after all the motherfucking arrows are gone or halting when some sentinal value has been reached; 30 miss combo, no life left, whatever.  The mechanics are slightly different, and even modifiable, but it’s still a perfectly legitimate 4 panel game irrespective of everything else.

Same damn thing when it runs a 5 panel game.

I don’t expect people to ever get over this.  There are still people who refuse to use speed modifiers or the bar, based on some weird pseudo-philosophy or dance game machismo, and hey; that works for some of them better than good form works for other people, but something like this is just silly.  It’s anti-growth, in my opinion.  If people really think of stepcharts as a legitimate form of art (are they, even?  I guess maybe), it shouldn’t matter what hardware or software they run on just like whether a piece of music is played on a grand piano or a keyboard doesn’t really have much bearing on the music.  Similarly, if people think the performance of stepcharts can constitute some form of athleticism, it also shouldn’t matter, just as a baseball game played on Coors Field or Wrigley Field is still a baseball game.  Yes, there are substantive distinctions, like how does altitude affect performance, how do the recessed panels of a DDR machine make runs harder than the panels of an ITG machine, etc, but that’s mostly dressing and of little ultimate concern.

As to 5 panel.  Earlier I said that it may be in its infancy.  Now, let me clarify that, because I’m sure it has a lot of people going “WTF”, as it were.  Now, DDR had been around for a long time before ITG came out, but what kinds of innovations did it really create in that segment of its life?  It created freezes and “boss songs”, and fleshed out most variants of crossover and double step.  These are substantive things, and should not be neglected.  ITG, however, fleshed out the use of 16ths, pushed the envelope on difficulty, and innovated the use of mines and hands in charts.  It also created freeze rolls, which as used in ITG are almost entirely inconsequential and redundant.  The only place they really see novel use is in fan charts; Welcome to Rainbow and Tricky Disco spring to mind.  In addition to these things, however, ITG forced the development of full minimalist styles of play, heel-toeing and future, which went on to revolutionize 4 panel competitive play.  There are two types of people that win ITG tournaments, people that do heel-toe or future, and people that can heel-toe or future.  It’s very significant.

Do you remember at the very beginning of the article when I said that playing Pump charts on shuffle would result in a different playing style than playing them regularly?  Maybe if you have a really long memory, because I certainly wrote a large number of words here.  Anyways, now is when I can explain the full significance of that.  A truly skilled 4 panel player can pass any song on random, and they can outperform a less skilled player at the task just as easily as if it hadn’t been .  DukAmok picked Summer Random on Blake at the 2008 US ITG OPEN (note: Blake has the most highly skilled future technique in the world, and is #1 on Groovestats.  Only his tournament consistency is in question) and won by that method.

5 panel, not so much.  What this means is quite simply that 5 panel games have not had a fully minimal, effective style developed for them yet.  This might mean such a style doesn’t exist, but it also might mean the nature of stepcharts, or of the competitive community, simply hasn’t forced it yet.  Sorry Jboy, I think the future might yet favor sliding, or something similar to it; although by remaining competitive with a no-bar style you might also be demonstrating something unique about 5 panel games.  Heaven knows I haven’t been able to put my finger on it yet.  Maybe history will give us our explanation.

At any rate, there are games like IIDX, which require technique which isn’t fully and uniquely implicit in the patterns of the game.  Then there are games like ITG, where such technique isn’t required, but the ability to perform it, or at least have the tools necessary to perform it running in the background while you play the normal way, just in case, will determine the outcome of high level competitions.  5 panel is neither of these at the moment, and it that sense it may have a bit of room left to grow.  That’s all I meant.

What a convenient segway into the subject of my elitism!  Which is probably the worst way to end an article about games in the history of ever, but I wrote all these damn words so too bad!  As I was telling MC Burgertime, I’m pretty sure I’m the OFFICIAL SUPERVILLIAN of the bemani community, what with being banned from forums and accosted by moderators more times than any living person, and having the somewhat eccentric notion that pretentiousness and second-guessing are the two most virtuous things in the world.  They are of course.  Second guessing is how you get something right when you were wrong about it the first time, which helps with the whole being right about things thing, and pretentiousness is the enlightened person’s way of showing they care about things.  There’s another reason I’ve been making a habit of being a dick lately though, and it’s not the same reason I argue (I just gave that reason, although people in general will just take these two things as inextricably related and be done with it, it seems).  It’s the most effective way I have of convincing people to do things.

Now, I learned this from Michael Rosenthal, although I don’t know if he was doing it self-consciously or not.  If not then, well, LOL, but anyways what I learned is this.  People tend to get satisfied and complacent with their performance well before it becomes anything really noteworthy, so you can’t appeal directly to their desire to be happy with themselves.  Making them unhappy with themselves is also a sketchy approach at best.  However, if you go out of your way to try and make people unhappy with themselves, what happens is that they become unhappy with you instead.  This is a kickass motivation.  Nobody likes a loud, arrogant, grandstanding disgusting person, and they certainly don’t like thinking they can’t beat them at something.  So, as someone who was already universally considered loud, arrogant, and disgusting, all I have to do is some grandstanding to make people unhappy with me and BAM!  Motivation.  I would have preferred the other way, personally, but like I said, OFFICIAL BEMANI SUPERVILLIAN and all.  It’s not like I chose the title for myself, I had the mantle thrust upon me, but I guess I’ll just go ahead and run with it.

Kev tells it like it is

Besides which, I’m not even that good at things, which will make the triumph of good versus evil that much easier to obtain.  Plus I have all these legitimate character motivations which I can pretend to draw on, even though I’m actually too disciplined for my brain to work that way except when I’m acting, like my intense hatred of excuses and of people blaming their body for things, driven by my secret womanhood, and my intense hatred of people who let themselves feel entrapped and impotent by things they can actually change, driven by my unchangeable manhood, and my self-hating ways, driven by my hatred of myself, and my ability to say things that are completely 100% true in a way that people think I’m lying, driven by the fact I took acting classes but also by the fact I’ve lived the role of a man my entire life and come to understand that no one can actually discern jack shit about other people’s innermost character. Oh, and Mazo, somehow.

Besides which, since when did telling people things that they already knew about themselves become offensive?  Steve is old and Jason is large?  lololol.  I don’t even have to do anything particularly villainous, I just have to twirl my mustache while being mundane and apparently it’s enough.

So yeah, I wouldn’t do it, but when I go to play at Boondocks the day after I piss everyone off to see that I’m still no match for Blue, or that Bossycow came and took one of my scores, it makes me ecstatic.  I take it right back of course, and maybe there is some truth in the eternal platitude that jackasses like me make the game less enjoyable, but I don’t think so, otherwise you wouldn’t have come in looking to beat me down.  When you can actually do it then maybe you’ll have earned something for once in your life.

I am officially a sidekick for the best gaming blog ever, watch out blogosphere

I am pleased to announce that I have secured a writing position here at the Infinity Injun. Hopefully time, craftiness, and luck, and the general social chaos that tends to surround our writers will work together to yield a bright future for this publication.

As my close friend, associate, and eternally destitute friend Mazo has already stated, I have struck upon an idea, in a haphazard and energetic way which can only be described perfectly in keeping with the spirit of this blog. I intend to become good at zero sum gaming; specifically, in the form of short term stock trading. Now, this is hardly something novel in itself. However I should hope that my perspective will entertain, for I am a gamer in the pure, like all of our current writers. So approaching my newest task as a gamer, I intend to use the tools I have as such to penetrate and understand my newest undertaking, and if possible to become skilled at it. I will be documenting this project periodically, although you can expect other articles from me as they come.

This is predominately a gaming blog. However gaming extends far beyond the simple learning of rules and execution of patterns. There is a world of peripheral things, which although unrelated to gaming itself come to be culturally significant. Enough with the abstraction, let me explain to you the background of how I arrived to this point.

It was recently my great pleasure to attend the US ITG OPEN in San Diego. For those of you not in the know, which should fairly reasonably be considered all of you, this was the most elitist dancing game tournament ever constructed. Which of course also means it was the best. Now, I will assume that if you are reading this blog, you at the very least know of DDR; Dance Dance Revolution, if you are a non-acronym using Philistine. However there is a perspective I have gotten from playing these games that is difficult to articulate, because it comes purely from substantive experience and not from something as cheap as words. Nevertheless, I will attempt to explain it here, and hopefully despite the fact it stems almost purely from aforementioned elitism, you will understand and appreciate it.

In the world of dance games, like all games, there are effective strategies and there are ineffective ones. One of the things that helps distinguish winners from losers is watching to see who makes excuses, because the people that do are generally trying to find some sort of abstract, poetic justification for holding on to their ineffective strategies. In DDR and ITG, use of the bar is the dominant strategy, and economy of motion is the principle force guiding and refining competitive technique. Now, if you have some understanding of this as it is, then great, however it is not crucially important that you understand this in depth.

This tournament featured most of the best players in the world. The technique on display was every bit what I was lead to expect, in terms of its sophistication. However, outside of what I learned from watching the final 4, I gained a bit of perspective from somewhere unexpected; from the people I thought of as intentional losers, the people who sacrifice victory for poetry. What I learned was exactly this. The internal order and consistency of even an ineffective method of doing things can be worth learning, and can even be perfected, despite the fact that it isn’t something that will hold up in comparison to something else.

In addition to the people playing by the books, using proper technique (and of course reaping the rewards as such), there were two players who surprised me not by their competitive performance, but by the discipline they showed at their nonstandard styles of play. Here were two people who had made up their own rules, different from the conventional ones, and inferior in competitive terms, yet the energy, the internal sensibility, the pure vitality with which they followed them was inspiring. It almost stopped mattering that they weren’t competitive, it was clear that they were both playing a different game; their own game. And both of them knew exactly what they were doing.

Flash back for a moment. Let me explain why these nonstandard forms of play are, statistically speaking, inferior to modern minimalist technique. Now, bar use dominates over barless play not so much because it increases the ability of a player to score, although it can and frequently does, but rather because it increases the consistency with which a player can achieve a certain score. Taking the uncertainty out of a game is always a good way to play it, unless the determinate outcome is always less than the indeterminate one. What I saw from these two, however, was something else. It was an acceptance of indeterminacy, and an invention of rules for navigating it. Clearly from results alone, it would be better to remove it. What I saw here though was two players gambling at something I had only ever thought to play by the numbers, and what’s more, they were still getting results. Not optimal results, but results governed by a sort of reason I hadn’t thought existed until I saw it with my own eyes.

So flash forward again. I am sharing a hotel room with Jboy, one of my aforementioned inspirations. Somehow it comes out that he makes his living playing poker. Epiphany. This is where it came together. Clearly not every zero sum game is as self negating as a coin toss is. What I had glimpsed at that tournament were rules for playing a game I wasn’t familiar with. A way of navigating uncertainty and still coming out on top. And since I had seen it with my own eyes, it became important for me to conquer it, and harness it, even if there are better games to play in the world.

That’s what brings me here. It’s a strange type of obstinacy and perhaps even a step down from the games I know, even and especially given that all this stemmed entirely from a perspective gained from playing a dancing game. Here I am though. I want to play the dirtier game. Not because I think it is better, but just because I want to understand some of that genius and discipline that I never understood could lurk in places I thought below me, until now.

-cheers,

kilroy