[hi19hi19]

An example of what I mean:

So you sit down, and the first file you play is something like Etude for the Sinners.
Long intro with like 1 NPS gives you time to explain the game, then once the basic concept of arrow -> hit the key sinks in, you get the immediate wow factor of a wall of JS.

That gives a narrative for people to follow. It's more interesting then just sitting down and playing idk, RATO or something, even though to an experienced player it might be way more obvious that RATO is the more impressive file to play well on.

From there, it's important that you KEEP YOUR COMBO.
People who are watching have no concept of accuracy, and are completely unable to read anything.
There's two things they can focus on: the lifebar, and the combo meter.
If you keep your lifebar topped and the combo unbroken, you are a god.

So you do 8 minutes of stuff that's fast, but you can reliably FC.
Then you can say something like "Okay that was a nice warmup" (cue more minds being blown, THIS ISN'T EVEN HIS FINAL FORM!?)

Then you play something that's actually hard like Thunder Light 1.5 (except rates isn't that great to do, because it's hard to explain the distinction between scroll speed and music rate, so I'll try to find/make a suitable 250bpm OH trilling file to recognizable video game music or appropriate bms stuff)

You get your first combo breaker, and everyone understands now like... Shit this is what the real deal looks like. Damn.

From there you can introduce some different concepts that are easy for people to understand.
Say take 15 seconds to explain what a jackhammer is, then play some jack file.
Doesn't matter that you're not the best at jacks, nobody needs to know that, you are more than good enough to entertain and show off some different stuff in the game.

You can show off xmod stuff here too maybe, if you feel comfortable with it.

20 minutes passed.
Now people think they've seen everything.
You take like a minute to explain "Okay so, so far I've been playing some fun legit files. But the Stepmania community is a bunch of nerds, we have our memes... there's something called dump files. The arrows don't go to the music at all, it's just meant to be as hard as possible. This is really, honestly, the hardest thing I can play."
(cue even more minds being blown, IS THIS TRULY HIS FINAL FORM!?)

Then you play a dump to cancer music, Twitch chat goes wild, and you get like a high A and people see what a file that actually makes your lifebar not be constantly topped look like.
You win, you take a bow, that's the end.





That's a narrative and a character.