the philosophy of Stepmania/rhythm games

[moches]

First of all, this may belong in Critical Thinking, but I wasn't quite sure. It seemed more like something that everybody here could discuss, so I'm putting it here for the time being, but if it's in the wrong place, I would have no issue if a mod just moved it over.

Backstory: in the summer, our Composition class was assigned to write a dialogue about a philosophical question ala Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Naturally, I decided to write about Stepmania because that's how I roll. I had also been thinking about the game recently, mostly because of how much my family disapproved of it.

I shared the essay with a couple of people, and all had some very interesting things to say, so I was wondering what you guys would all think.

Be warned, it is corny because it's written from my perspective, but oh well.

(Loud tapping is heard from the inner room. Family members shake their heads in disgust.)

Miriam: I can’t hear myself think over this racket!

Mom: He’s been playing that for an HOUR now! I’ve had enough. MOSES!

Moses: (takes off earphones) I’m sorry, did you just call me?

Mom: What is that ridiculous arrow game you’ve been playing? I thought I told you in elementary school to stop playing it, and now it’s been eight years. You have nothing to gain from tapping keys to anime music, and the sound is driving us crazy. Just stop!

Moses: Nothing to gain? You do realize I’ve been playing it for a reason, right? Stepmania—not “arrow game”—is basically an instrument to me at this point.

Mom: An instrument? You’re high right now, aren’t you? It’s a game, Moses, not an experience! How can a rhythm game possibly be anything close to an instrument?

Moses: Well, I’ll answer that, but I still see this as something that needs to be nurtured, not dismissed. Here, I’ll sit down and explain it right now.

You guys have always said that Stepmania is a waste of my time—

Miriam, Mom: IT IS!

Moses: Maybe I should just skip the introduction. The thing is, you guys see it as a waste of my time, but I still invested time into it. The reason I kept playing is that I wanted to learn how to play well, and there are skills you need: you have to develop hand-eye coordination, learn to read predefined charts of notes that reflect the music (these are referred to as “stepcharts”), and time everything as the chart demands. Sounds similar to learning to play an instrument to me.

Miriam: But you don’t see people playing the computer keyboard in concert halls.

Moses: True, but just because it doesn’t produce sound doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require skills. And furthermore, simulation is getting much better with time: djMAX, for example, plays songs differently depending on how you time them, so that perfect timing plays the best possible version of a song while sloppy playing will make it a mess. Whether you’re playing an instrument or a game, there’s a clear difference in outcome dependent on skill. You can play an instrument well. You can play a game well. And in both situations, playing well means playing music well.

Mom: But that doesn’t apply to all games! Stepmania is just four keys. It’s not reflective of any one instrument in general.

Moses: Fair enough; maybe I shouldn’t have generalized. But if that’s the case, then let’s look at both types of rhythm games.

Some rhythm games are designed to recreate the experience of playing a specific instrument, like Guitar Hero. Even if they’re not perfect representations of their respective instruments, they do share the fundamental characteristics of an instrument: they utilize learned skills and the application of those skills produces sound which may or may not be good. If your concern is about accurate simulation, than these games are clearly adequate.

Other rhythm games, like Stepmania, don’t reflect any one instrument but instead center on an abstract format (Stepmania only has four columns on which notes scroll up). In these games, the similarities to an instrument are limited strictly to skill, but the process of playing can still accurately reflect a song; in fact, it can even be more effective in doing so than instrument-simulation based rhythm games. This has to do with the second characteristic rhythm games share with instruments: self-expression.

Miriam: Self-expression? Okay, I’ve seen you playing Stepmania before, and unless you think headbanging qualifies as self-expression, I don’t see what your point is.

Moses: Miriam, you play the clarinet, right?

Miriam: Duh.

Moses: And you’ve performed solos, haven’t you?

Miriam: You’ve seen them, right?

Moses: And you’ve also written music in those music theory classes you took in high school?

Miriam: Yes. This isn’t about me, though. What does this have to do with your game obsession?

Moses: I have done all of those things. I’ve played solos before. I’ve even written what rhythm gamers would consider to be their sheet music by writing my own stepcharts. The thing is, a song in a rhythm game is nothing without a good stepchart that emphasizes specific aspects of the song that should be emphasized.

Miriam: But how do you play solos? These charts are still made for people to hit as accurately as possible for the highest score. There’s no self-expression in that.

Moses: But who says there can’t be? Do the great clarinet players, the great musicians, stick to every note in their sheet music? Or do they interpret it as a scholar interprets a text, finding themselves with the chart only serving as a guideline? Anyone can splash colors onto a canvas and call it a painting; it takes an artist to infuse the colors with a sense of meaning. The same goes for stepcharting: do you want a crash course on how our philosophy works as sheet music?

Mom: Enlighten me.

Moses: I’m only well-versed in Stepmania, but even that one game has a myriad of subtext beneath each note. Consider, first of all, the freeze note, a special sustained note that must be held in order to score. The traditional use was to use them to emphasize melody, but over time, a novel use of the freeze developed.

You see, nowadays, many freezes aren’t even long enough to hold. These notes are called minifreezes. You can use them to emphasize percussion, background vocals or synths, and even to highlight a melody. Speaking of melody, one of the theories that developed over the years is designed to highlight just that: we refer to it as pitch relevancy, which is the idea that lower pitches go on the left and higher pitches go on the right.

In sheet music, we emphasize notes with special marks that indicate dynamics or textures (such as staccato or legato). Stepmania doesn’t have marks for forte or piano, but it does have a variety of other techniques that can be used to achieve similar effects. Layering notes to be less dense in softer parts and more dense in louder parts uses intensity as a dynamic mark. Mines, which are notes that explode if you hit them and must therefore be avoided, can be placed directly after particularly strong notes to have a staccato effect. And one theory that has developed very recently is color theory, which is used by offsetting the BPM (beats per minute) of the file so that all the notes of one instrument or voice shift to a particular color. This can either be used in lieu of minifreezes to bring out specific melodies or motifs or as a sort of antiphonal technique, where the file may shift between two different colors.

Note that these theories only carry subtext because somebody had the idea in the first place: like music theory has gradually become more complex with time, Stepmania has also adapted to become a better fit for the music.

Mom: That’s all interesting, but how is that self-expression? Aren’t you just trying to cram everything you can into the chart?

Moses: Not necessarily! The idea behind stepcharting theory is not capturing everything but capturing what’s most important so that playing the file perfectly is going to yield the ideal version of the song on which it was modeled. Where self-expression comes in is the subjectivity of what that ideal is: you can see dozens of YouTube covers of one song and each has its own voice, its own rhythms. The same applies to stepcharting. Therefore, the art is almost metacontextual: it is not only sheet music for a game but also a betrayal of one’s own interpretation of the music itself.

Miriam: …hmm. Just one question: how do players express themselves through the music? Aren’t they just going for the highest score possible, what the stepartist desires and sees as “ideal”?

Moses: You’re confusing want with need: the player doesn’t need to conform to the standards. Both the artist and player interact with the song, the artist by stepping it, and the player by putting his own spin on the chart. You can see this in games like DanceDanceRevolution, where some players prefer to play freestyle, only using the stepchart as a sort of guide to what in the music to follow while including their own dance moves in the blank space. Music isn’t a one-way path but a constant back-and-forth, and everybody who plays rhythm games has a unique take on it.

Mom: It just seems so unproductive, though. You really have to do this through a game?

Moses: Well, why can’t I? Not everybody is a musical prodigy. Not everybody weeps at the sound of a violin. Sometimes we find beauty in the smaller things, like a free-source rhythm game based on DDR that is actively played by maybe a hundred thousand people out of seven billion. It has nothing to do with what’s traditionally acceptable or even “efficient”: I find it to be exhilarating. You guys just need to open your minds to what the people around you see.

Mom: You’re doing this out of a love for music, is that what you’re saying?

Moses: Absolutely.

Mom: Then why don’t you join a musical community? A game, while useful in a limited context, simply doesn’t seem like a replacement for real experiences.

Moses: But I do have real experiences! Mom, communities can form around anything: our hobbies, our passions, even our inability to poop (if you Google that, people will probably tell you that you have butt cancer). I’d even argue that Stepmania, along with certain other rhythm games, is a better fit for a musical aficionado than a traditional musical community precisely because of its limited application.

Think of it this way. A song is never just one instrument. It’s drums, bass, guitar, clarinet, violin, digeridoo. You can play one instrument, and you will receive recognition and develop an appreciation for the music you experience. But isn’t it only for that instrument? Do you develop the same love for the drums? The violin? The digeridoo? What if all you play is classical music, and you despise every other genre of music as low-brow pop fluff?

Stepmania is different because it forces you to interact not with any one instrument but with the song as a whole. The various techniques found in stepcharts condense radically different styles of music into a couple of easily recognizable and universal forms. Jazz and rock may attract completely different crowds, but in Stepmania their charts may look eerily similar. By limiting the application of any individual instrument, it expands its focus to everything, so that players can develop a love for MUSIC as a whole.

And of course, that love for music can be built upon with a community. Differences in opinion incite discussion, and criticism will arise, as it will in any creation process. People on both sides of the gaming spectrum—the creators and the players—learn how to best express themselves, and because the creation of stepcharts is in this way a collaborative process, the sharing of diverse ideas and opinions on music occurs naturally. By beginning with a universally relatable expression of music in the form of a game, Stepmania has actually built one of the most engaging musical communities online.

Miriam: You’re getting all of this from a game? I just don’t see how you see it as such a deep experience. It’s just a game.

Moses: Maybe this refusal to acknowledge the good games can do comes from the struggle each of us faces to make a unique streak on the face of humanity. We want to be independent, useful, creative, original, and above all, smart. But in my eight years of playing this game, what I’ve learned is that you never set yourself on that path alone but begin where everybody else starts. And in that way, Stepmania has been useful to me: it has taught me to value the thoughts of others. It has taught me to see new uses for old things. And most importantly, it has taught me the importance of the people around you. You can learn a lot more from them than they can from you.

So maybe I could have used that time to practice the drums, or become a clarinet master, or conquer Finland. But I didn’t—and though I doubt many will admit it, people like me who stayed to play a silly game for eight years ended up learning plenty in that time. Maybe we just need to get past our fear of being useless or stupid. Maybe there’s a lot to learn from the games we play if we stop seeing them as things to be scored on and start seeing them like we would any other activity: as subjective, personal experiences that can hold meaning for everybody.

Miriam: Okay, okay, okay. I don’t know why you’re inflicting this on us. I don’t care if you’re useless and stupid…just please be useless and stupid somewhere else. I have an essay to write and your tapping is driving me nuts.

Moses: Heh. Funny you should mention that.

Mom: Room, Moses.

Is there really validity to the comparison between Stepmania and real musicians/real music? What do you guys think?