February 15, 2004

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Truly, We Live in a Golden Age

So Dance Dance Revolution is this popular arcade game. Players step on colored panels in time to throbbing club music, accruing positive feedback for well-placed moves. (Here’s a picture. Yes, that’s Mario Lopez and Danny Bonaduce.)

Funny that Kevin should mention DDR this weekend; I also just played it. He theorizes that my experience keeping time in high school marching band would make me a good DDR player. Sadly… no.

But even sans skill, DDR is the most fun I’ve ever had in an arcade. So after I read Kevin’s post, I thought: Hmm, wonder how much the arcade game goes for on eBay?

I pre-emptively spurn the NES Power Pad-style DDR peripheral for the PlayStation. Too ghetto.

Well… it turns out there’s a heavy-duty arcade-style platform peripheral you can get!

And so now I’m thinking to myself: Couple hundred for a PS2. $40 for the game. $150 for the platform. That’s a mere $400 for a functionally infinite amount of fun.

So. Yes.

Listen, I know that this post is not living up to the standards of wit and composition that Matt still clutches at for this blog. So let me grasp for some larger theme: Might DDR set a new standard for egalitarian, Aristotelian fun in our civilization?

Egalitarian because anybody can play DDR. Okay, no, not quite — the frail, the disabled, and the morbidly obese are precluded from DRR fun, I admit, and this is a shortcoming. But there remains a broad swath of the population that can easily get it on DDR-style for a single dollar.

Aristotelian because DDR can be difficult but not that difficult. Aristotle said that we most enjoy things that push us to our limits but don’t frustrate us: things that, if we try our best, we can succeed at. DDR achieves this better than most other video games, with their arcane controls and strange play conventions.

But those two factors, while significant, wouldn’t be enough to explain DDR’s appeal and its success. (It is very popular in the United States and crazy popular in Japan.) The final ingredient, the X-factor that explains why DDR has come along in our time and not a previous age, is the sub-woofer.

Okay, that’s my best effort. Really, I just wanted to write about how cheap it would be to buy a kickin’ Dance Dance Revolution setup.