dance dance revolution

lessons from ddr

also on mit admissions (actually this is my last admissions post for the foreseeable future)

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there is a ddr (dance dance revolution) machine in the basement of walker memorial. i have known this fact for at least a year, but didn’t bother actually checking out the machine until around two weeks ago, because i’ve never been good at rhythm games and have relatively slow reaction times so i assumed ddr would be a struggle

this is what the ddr screen + pads setup looks like

the basic mechanics of ddr are as follows: there are four pads on the ground, each corresponding to an arrow direction (up/down/left/right). players choose from a variety of songs; when a song begins, arrows begin moving from the bottom of the screen to the top, and the player’s job is to step on the pads at the same time that the corresponding arrows reach the top of the screen; you get points based on how well your footsteps match the onscreen arrow movements. usually the arrow patterns are designed to match the beats and rhythms of the song, so if played correctly you should feel like you’re moving in sync with the song

example of a typical sequence of arrows

i ended up enjoying ddr a lot more than i’d expected to, largely because the learning curve for beginners is well-designed and pretty satisfying. over the course of my first hour of gameplay i learned how to keep myself centered on the pads without looking at the ground (through a mix of muscle memory and leaning on the bar behind the machine), how to time my footsteps more precisely (by relying less on visual cues and more on the song audio), as well as more advanced gameplay mechanics like jumps (simultaneous arrows that require stepping on two pads at once) and freezes (long arrows that require holding down a pad for a sustained amount of time)

example of a sequence containing both a freeze and a jump

towards the end of my second ddr session i found a level i wanted to beat in my remaining week at mit. it was grand escape, a song that features prominently in weathering with you, one of my favorite anime movies. unfortunately it seemed like i was out of my depth - every time i tried grand escape, i’d survive for the first four minutes, which were relatively beginner-friendly, and then i’d reach the climax of the song and my screen would fill up with arrows:

consecutive jumps in the climax of grand escape

while the rest of the song contained maybe one jump every ten or twenty beats, the climax had 27 jumps in a row. i simply did not have the processing power to react to two arrows at a time, coming in every beat at a tempo of 146 bpm or 2.43 beats per second, so i lost during the same section every time

a few days later one of my friends (F) watched me attempt and fail grand escape, and then we had the following conversation:

F: i think you need to change the game settings and increase your onscreen arrow speed

me: but if the arrows move up the screen faster, i’ll have less time to react to each one

F: i don’t think your problem is not having enough time to react to the arrows. i think your problem is that there are so many arrows cluttering the screen during the climax that it’s interfering with your ability to read the arrows, and if there were less arrows onscreen you’d be able to process them faster

me: but doesn’t having less arrows onscreen make it harder to prepare? like, don’t i want to be able to read the next two or three sets of arrows at the same time so i can plan better for them?

F: you should never have to plan multiple beats in advance

me: oh…

i took the advice and changed the arrow speed settings so that the arrows moved 2-3x faster than they previously did. here’s what the same part of the song looks like before and after the speedup:

the left is grand escape with regular settings; the right is the same level with faster onscreen arrow speeds but the same musical tempo and footstep patterns

it turns out my friend was correct - even though increasing the arrow speed meant i had less time to prepare for each beat, the decrease in screen clutter allowed me to read off the arrows much faster, and a few attempts later i was able to hit most of the jumps and beat the level

nowhere near perfect, but at least i didn’t lose!

in retrospect it’s almost comical how closely my struggles with ddr and grand escape mirrored my struggles with anxiety. you expend so much energy trying to look further into the future and plan more steps in advance, and you put so much on your plate that the clutter makes it hard to concentrate on anything at all; then when you encounter difficulties you tell yourself the answer is to think even harder and plan even better. but maybe none of that is true; maybe what you needed all along was a way to worry less about the future, to clear out your plate and give yourself the space to focus on doing one thing well at a time