Ask Me Anything rhythm game related

[Arch0wl]

I realize that there is an AMA forum, but I'd like to have a Q&A about any rhythm game question you can throw at me.

The purpose being -- I'm trying to write enough material to fill an ebook about rhythm games. There is a lot to this niche of games, and I might have forgotten about something along the way.

If it has something to do with rhythm games (and not me personally) I'll do my best to answer it, no matter how complicated your question. In fact, the weirder the better.

e.g. "Does FFR make you smarter?" -- no, except possibly on the pattern recognition subtest part of spatial intelligence metrics, but that comprises only a portion of total spatial IQ, which in turn comprises half of IQ.

e.g.2: "I am highly aware of how anything touching my fingers feels while playing FFR and get distracted by how my how my hands/fingers feel when the keys/keyboard touches them. Is this normal?" -- yes. Since you've done an activity that develops these muscles a lot, you're more aware of factors affecting performance, such as the placement of the keys or the responsiveness of the keys to your touch. The catchall term for this is proprioception.

[Poison-]

How long until we all have carpal tunnel

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Poison-

How long until we all have carpal tunnel

Average age of carpal tunnel diagnosis is between 30 and 60, and women are three times as likely to receive a diagnosis. However, it's treatable.

[TC_Halogen]

hey, something that you've made that I won't be locking/deleting/reporting to staff, etc

1.) When was the first time you touched any sort of rhythm game (what year?)
2.) Which games do you prominently play at the moment?
3.) Do you attribute your rhythm gaming experience to some other ability that you've acquired? (as an example: I became really interested in music production after playing FFR/ITG for a while)

[blindreper1179]

Says no personal questions
Asks all personal questions

[Mahou]

Does rhythm gaming fuck with your eye sight over a period of time?

[Kraezymann]

Silly TC!

My questions are all sort of connected:

Do you think that games like DDR and PIU have a chance at having a larger impact on youth than they do now?

Are rhythm games going to live in a purgatory like state because of it's niche community/audience, or will they take off?

Will there be or has there been a ''golden age'' for rhythm games?

What do you think is the main appeal to rhythm games in general? The music? Gameplay? Is it different between games like IIDX and DDR?

And lastly; everyone will be different, but at what ages would we find it difficult to continue playing these games? Longer for less physically demanding games like SM, IIDX, and POP'N?

This is an interesting topic for me; thank you for this

[noname219]

What do you think is the next step in rhythm gaming ?

Is there any probabilities that a program could create stepfiles automatically in the future ? Or do you know anyone working on such a thing ?

Anyway, you don't have to respond to this next one, but I was curious to know why you were banned for a month in 2003.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by TC_Halogen

hey, something that you've made that I won't be locking/deleting/reporting to staff, etc

1.) When was the first time you touched any sort of rhythm game (what year?)
2.) Which games do you prominently play at the moment?
3.) Do you attribute your rhythm gaming experience to some other ability that you've acquired? (as an example: I became really interested in music production after playing FFR/ITG for a while)

1)

My first experience touching a rhythm game, ever, was in 2000, so 15 years ago. I used a DDR pad. I had no idea that the difficulty levels went so high and I had no idea how a person would go about playing them. For something as simple as "alternate with your left and right foot" there are preposterously few instructions on how to do this in the actual game, and YouTube didn't exist, so you had to just either infer how to do the steps or flounder. I only had myself at home so I floundered.

My first attempt to make any earnest effort to get better was in very late 2001, so a little over 13 years ago. I went to an arcade and saw some kids playing a 6-footer on medium, which in 3rd mix was called "trick". To me as a thirteen year old THEY WERE MOVING SO FAST. But, to me as an adult and elite player, it registers as tortoise speed shit I can do with one leg.

As a kid in 5th grade, I was fat and had very few opportunities outside of academics to excel in anything involving motor skills or intellect. You could read a lot of books, but everyone already knew I was smart, so I wanted to apply my intellect in other ways. I dumped a lot of time into video games, because 10-year old me regarded this as a smart person activity. The kinds of video games I liked to play though (RPGs) didn't have very clear skill brackets, and other games I liked to play (Power Stone for the Dreamcast e.g.) had too much of a luck factor to say who was really better; plus, you are only as good as your friends.

DDR was the first game I played that had defined skill tiers and ways to gauge your progress in a linear progression. Getting an 'A' on a song meant the same thing, every time, and an A on a hard song was as valuable the first time as it was a few days from then. It didn't change based on who you were playing.

To me, this was as addictive like meth. Worse than meth, because I've done meth, and meth isn't that addictive. The self-esteem boost this provided to let me know hey, you are actually really good at something relative to all the people in this room was something I, as a kid, had never heard before outside of being told I was the smartest kid in the classroom by teachers, which in my preteen brain was a fuzzy concept anyway. Here I had hard proof: I can do this, and you can't.

So eventually I just wanted to be like the kids who played that 6-footer on medium. They were the coolest people in the world to me at that time.

But when something finally clicked and my brain processed turns and 8th notes, my CNS adaptation spiked and I could instantly do 7-footers and 8-footers. I was passing hard (heavy / maniac) difficulty songs and only a few other people in the arcade could do this. I remember when I first started playing I saw this black dude play Afronova, which I had some really racist association about (and in my defense I was 12), but he failed toward the end. So that was the holy grail of everyone at the arcade: pass Afronova.

Eventually I did. I realized I was one of maybe 2-3 people in the arcade who could.

There was this other black kid named Canton who started going there and was also really good. I've actually kept up with and went to high school with. He and I were matched for a while but, after some magic boundary point, I was able to pass MAX 300 before anyone else and was the best player at my arcade.

I was never the best in my city -- I think the best I managed was #2 at one point -- but it was my first experience (prior to Stepmania) being competitive at anything and succeeding and having real measurements of progress, as opposed to subjective measurements like "you're so smart!" or whatever.

After that, I went on to find Stepmania, FFR, and so on, but that's a summary of the first time I ever touched a rhythm game. A lot of this competitive spirit has transferred to lifting, since both DDR and weightlifting have similar mechanisms of progress.

2)

ITG and Stepmania. That's it.

I'm interested in seeing how far I can develop muscles used in these games to get better and apply training principles from lifting to music games.

So far, HIIT has produced immense progress with ITG. I'm going to add some weighted stepmania stuff to my next mass cycle and see how it improves my ability, if at all.

3)

Yes. Among many other things, the most noticeable lifestyle shift is that now I weight train and powerlift in addition to playing dancing games, because your strength is a leaderboard literally everyone around you is ranked on.

In fact, pretty much anything with a leaderboard appeals to me. I prefer games with leaderboards to games without, even if I don't do very well on those leaderboards. My victories feel more meaningful.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Mahou

Does rhythm gaming fuck with your eye sight over a period of time?

I doubt it. Or at least no more than being in front of a screen for long periods of time would for any other profession.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Kraezymann

1) Do you think that games like DDR and PIU have a chance at having a larger impact on youth than they do now?

2) Are rhythm games going to live in a purgatory like state because of it's niche community/audience, or will they take off?

3) Will there be or has there been a ''golden age'' for rhythm games?

4) What do you think is the main appeal to rhythm games in general? The music? Gameplay? Is it different between games like IIDX and DDR?

5) And lastly; everyone will be different, but at what ages would we find it difficult to continue playing these games? Longer for less physically demanding games like SM, IIDX, and POP'N?

1)

No. I wrote about this in a different thread, but the golden age for these kinds of games is over.

I will elaborate on this in response to the "future of rhythm games" question, but here is what I've written elsewhere on why the current model of rhythm game cannot last for much longer, cut down to answer the specific aspects of this question:

If you have to go out of the way to acquire the hardware to play a game, your game is at an immediate disadvantage in the current game marketplace. Can you play it on a computer? A smartphone? No? Good luck. If you have to physically drive yourself to an arcade, you're fucked. Arcades have been on the decline for a while, due to the high cost of game machines and low audience of people willing to pay for those games, among other factors. They used to be a hangout for teenagers, but frankly (a) teenagers are partying earlier, so they're going to parties instead of arcades and (b) teenagers have more entertaining things to do now than go to arcades and dick around.

The trend of web use has been OVERWHELMINGLY to hub websites (facebook is a social hub e.g.), rather than specific ones. The only forums/non-social media websites I know now that are still active exist for EXTREMELY specific purposes -- often illicit (bluelight) or with technical, specialized knowledge that isn't easily obtained through mainstream study (bodybuilding, or this 'flyertalk' forum my friend goes to where he figures out how to game flyer points to get trips for free.)

Steam itself is a hub platform for games you can download. The vast majority of games still played on PC are played via steam. Few people buy pc games any other way anymore. They definitely don't download them for free off of open source websites, unless their friends goad them into it like with League of Legends, but that game create incentives for the player to goad their friends into a lot of shit.

Now, while games like League of Legends go against this trend, they are an exceptional minority, and they happen to use powerful psychological mechanics that the music game genre simply isn't capable of using. The variable role you will have in a team's win or loss means people will not always have a very clear perception of where they stand, skill-wise, and these differences are not very clear. So people will be fine with replaying for hours, because they think they can win this time, or the next time, or the next time.

In contrast, virtually ANY bemani-style rhythm game does not have this luck factor, due to the very nature of the game. It's very clear where you stand skill-wise. You will know this within a handful of songs, if not one, and you will very quickly realize that getting six B grades in a row means you're probably not going to get an AA the next time. Improvement is due almost entirely to skill, and very little to luck and definitely not due to the doings of other people.

People are going to play games on consoles, or they're going to play games on touchscreens, or both. They're not going to use a keyboard if they don't have to; FFR used the keyboard because it was something everyone had at the time, and it was assumed that everyone would have one since practically no one could use a computer without a keyboard. But since this is changing with touchscreen progress, a fundamental assumption that the game devs had no longer applies. Now, imagine how this works in an arcade setting. These kids want to play the game at their house, and the most they can do is buy a shitty carpet pad. Since arcades aren't as common, they're not going to find machines, and so on.

Arcade: drive, spend real money each time I play
Smarphone: download the app on something I already have, play for free RIGHT NOW

There is no contest. Smartphones win.

I really like music games. I will probably always play Stepmania. But I am an enthusiast, and you are an enthusiast, and we are enthusiasts. I realize this is an obscure game that I'm alone in liking among 99.9% of people I know in person, and I don't ever expect games like DDR to return to 2001 levels of popularity or games like FFR to return to 2006 levels of popularity.

Think of activity on these sorts of games like barrels of oil -- we can't actually make more oil in the earth, we can just extract what we already have. Previously we could make activity because new users would eventually become old users who recruit new users and so on. However, this process has largely stopped, so we're just coasting on whatever activity already exists, with an exceptional group of new players who are extremely impressive but not indicative of the current trend nonetheless.

Our technology has simply changed too much for arcades to live for much longer, unless they're a niche arcade like some that are currently opening here in San Antonio. But that won't make DDR a game for younger kids; it'll reinforce its enthusiast status.

2)

Depends. A real enthusiast community is something like Minecraft. That's the right way to do user-created content. Now, we live in a shadow of a series of games that did not encourage user-created content and where the playerbase was far more enthusiastic about the game than it is now, so players now frequently look back to the past for ideas of new things to do. You need to think like how the Minecraft developers were thinking when they were first trying to develop a modding community around the game -- they didn't think "this is going to be popular", they thought "how can we make this work seamlessly for people who are going to nerd out over this game anyway" and everything flowed from there. Minecraft is a game by nerds, for nerds. If Stepmania and other rhythm games embrace this, you could see some resurgence in a different way.

3)

Yes.

DDR: 2000-2003
IIDX: Don't know
Pop'n Music: From around the release of Pop'n 9 to around the release of Cowboy EX.
ITG: 2005-2008
Stepmania: 2003-2007

4)

You are essentially graded on your performance. This gives a reward for progressing. Also, the music helps too.

5)

I'm not sure what you mean by "at what ages would we find it difficult to continue playing these games?"

You will find it very difficult to play Pop'n 10 years from now because you will find it very difficult to get any sort of controller or machine to use. The game will likely be gone or underground by that point. This also applies to IIDX.

Stepmania, meanwhile, is permanent. You will always be able to play Stepmania for as long as keyboards exist. And even after that, since you could construct controllers via USB.

If you mean what age your body is likely to deteriorate and prevent playing these games, I'd use the 30-60 estimate for carpal tunnel for hand-based games. 50? Something like that. But if you have surgery or just in general don't use practices that encourage carpal tunnel, you should be fine.

ITG and DDR you can play probably forever. They are just synchronized high intensity interval training calf raises, in effect.

[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by noname219

1) What do you think is the next step in rhythm gaming ?

2) Is there any probabilities that a program could create stepfiles automatically in the future ? Or do you know anyone working on such a thing ?

3) why you were banned for a month in 2003.

1)

Sustainability.

DDR machines are flashy. They are designed to attract arcade-going idiots who pay attention to large lights and loud bass. This is also true for IIDX machines, for Pop'n machines, and so on. There's a reason a lot of former DDR players have become DJs -- it's the same shit, but grown-up.

Any time nerds realize their content is for nerds they drop the extra shit and just focus on the content period.

By "sustainable" I mean reducing the steps a player has to engaging with content and producing content. Right now, unless you're part of a very select group to live near an R21 machine, there are two options for playing ITG custom songs:

1. Buy an ITG machine ($5000+)
2. Buy a DDR machine ($2000+) and mod it into a Stepmania cabinet ($3000+ total)
3. Buy a flatscreen and pads from, say, Omega ITG-X with bar mods for $500+

The third option is obviously the most sustainable and many people could do this sort of thing for quite some time to come. A lot of people can't afford a machine, but a lot of people can afford an arcade-style pad, bar mod, and flatscreen TV.

Other examples of unsustainable development: Stepmania has banners. Why the fuck does it need banners? Or even backgrounds period? These things are unnecessary. They exist only because DDR used them, and DDR added them because they had a graphics team they could throw money at for a bunch of things. It's unsustainable because it adds unnecessary labor to the simfile creator, and you can't expect new audiences to continually adapt to a needless learning curve for simfile creation.

So, trends will be:

1. emulating everything in Stepmania, as opposed to buying a dedicated game
2. using your own home setups, as opposed to arcades
3. customizing the experience in ways not described here

2)

Autogen in stepmania already does this. Were you looking for something more developed? I don't know of many automated stepping programs, to be honest.

3)

No idea. I've probably been banned from FFR over a dozen times.

[FF_rules]

Question 1: Thoughts on the current direction of new age rhythm games Japan is producing? (Jubeats 2008~, Sound Voltex 2012~, etc)

Question 2: Best medium, your opinion + opinion of general masses/consumers, for rhythm game (GuitarHero/RockBand, IIDX, DDR, etc) ~Generally the masses of western of audience I assume unless you're somewhere in the east.

Question 3: Could DDR-esque games be used as a form of free style long duration cardio and be recognized at the state level for gym periods at public/private schools (Odd ball question: My high school had a custom cabinet made by one of the gym teachers who used it to play around and eventually got the school's permission to play with it for a while every friday gym class instead of doing a standard run we could spend the entire 40 minute period doing non stop ddr. -It only lasted for a few tries before people just started doing the runs again because people were playing too difficult songs *cough*)

~Here to ask the constructive questions!

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

1)
They used to be a hangout for teenagers, but frankly (a) teenagers are partying earlier, so they're going to parties instead of arcades and (b) teenagers have more entertaining things to do now than go to arcades and dick around.

Entirely western view; Japanese arcades are still going for the most part if not due to a crowd of dedicated individuals. It's already a dead scene for the most part in the states though. I've seen too many arcades close out in Hawaii alone; the visit rates are abysmal (And the crowd is fully casual).
Which brings up a good question...
Question 4: With the current state of western arcades dying; if you were tasked to revive the scene, how would you do it (if at all possible) -assume there's no depression and middle/lower class can afford to play around at an arcade for an hour or so after school.

[Kraezymann]

Originally Posted by Arch0wl

If you mean what age your body is likely to deteriorate and prevent playing these games, I'd use the 30-60 estimate for carpal tunnel for hand-based games. 50? Something like that. But if you have surgery or just in general don't use practices that encourage carpal tunnel, you should be fine.

ITG and DDR you can play probably forever. They are just synchronized high intensity interval training calf raises, in effect.

That was essentially my question yeah; I was thinking about at what point might it be difficult for us physically to continue playing, and never thought to consider technical limitations like availability.

Thanks for the answers

[Dynam0]

When is blur v2 coming out (I'm serious)

[kmay]

things like techniques would need to be address. hand positioning, posture, key setup. ways to improve faster, like isolations and rates.

[Deadlyx39]

1: I'm trying to get my friends involved in FFR and/or Stepmania and I don't know how to go about it. What's a good idea to get them involved in FFR or Stepmania?

2: Do you think DJ Hero could have lasted as a franchise if there wasn't money problems that shut down the series?

3: Do you think that next gen consoles will get a rhythm game released that doesn't use the Kinect or the PlayStation camera? To be more specific, will a peripheral based rhythm game ever be released on next gen consoles?

[Trumpet63]

1.) Do you know anything about SDO-X?

2.) Do you know anything about Flow (the psychological concept)?

3.) If you had to create a logical structure through which to analyze and differentiate all rhythm games, what categories or parameters would you use?

[rushyrulz]

Does it help in bed?

[_Zenith_]

Originally Posted by Trumpet63

1.) Do you know anything about SDO-X?

You are literally the first person that I have seen mention SDO-X since I have tried to mention it years ago.

Don't dare say you play SDO-X or even any of the other SDOs (China being the biggest and first in their industry, America being the only SDO that has crashed and been removed entirely). I have a lot of friends who still play SDO-X (which is predominantly Malaysian, but more Chinese have been playing lately, and you still have your Southern Americans during the day-time in America) and it's been infested with a program used to hack during the game.

And the rate that this is happening is not going down, but exponentially increasing, soon to be only filled with hackers. This is the main reason why I have quit SDO-X and will never touch it again.