It's a lifestyle, not a hobby
If you were to describe dance games to someone who had never heard of it before, they could be excused for seeing it as a game or a means to pass time. After all, it has all the hallmarks of one - it looks like a huge video arcade machine with colors and simplified inputs and a set of rules that must be followed, as well as statistical grading aspect that pits you against the machine or against other human players.
For lack of a better definition, this must be what a video game entails.
However, to anyone who actually plays them on a regular basis, it's easy to watch them grow into something far greater, to become something akin to a lifestyle and and something that requires regular play and consistent commitment in order to hone one's skills and improve. This still falls under the video game umbrella, as there are plenty of competitive e-sports leagues that facilitate professional play, and one large enough that players can undertake games such as Overwatch and League of Legends as their profession.
However, dance games have two major distinctions from traditional e-sports leagues:
- They are heavily physical
- Dance game players do not get paid
This series of posts will explore what it means to be a "professional" dance game player, for better or worse, and the surprising changes it brings about in one's daily lifestyle.
There's more than at first glance
The inherent physicality of dance games (this includes all rhythm games hit with the feet, including In The Groove, Dance Dance Revolution, Pump It Up and even other less intense games like Just Dance) puts an added strain on the body that games played with the fingers and the hands or the mind have. Whilst they can indeed become physically straining over a long period of time, dance games can exhaust a player within one or two hours, so contact time between the player and the game is limited.
Even within those couple of hours, the actual time spent under tension is limited to a maximum of minutes, although there are outliers at the top end of the spectrum who are good enough to stretch this out into the low hours of steady output.
The best way to see the dance game life is alot like how one could imagine the life of a marathon runner. Lots of time is spent running, and time is spent recovering and feeding for the next opportunity to run. The lifestyle is very focused, efficient and regular, and stamina-intensive dance games can be seen much the same way.
Whilst I play primarily for speed and stamina, there are players who play to obtain as many 100% scores as they can, or get as close to it as possible on rhythmically difficult simfiles. Others play on two platforms, and we call this doubles play, which adds its own dimension of difficulty. Not many people play for the dance or performance aspect anymore, as its become long outdated, so the mental visual of someone performing breakdance moves on a dance machine is long past. The initial promotional draw of Dance Dance Revolution was that form of dance performance as expressed on a restricted machine, but time and the escalating skill of players quickly paved the way for new generations who were more focused on very specific and fine points of the game.