dance dance revolution ii

i first wrote about ddr back in may 2023, primarily through the lens of overthinking and anxiety. i guess this is a sequel?

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i try to visit boston every six months or so, and while i’m there i play as much ddr as my friends are willing to put up with. it wasn’t until after graduating that i appreciated how good the ddr setup at mit is - peaceful, free of charge, lots of familiar songs. by contrast the best ddr near my house in sf is a thirty minute drive away, in an arcade too loud for me to hear anything clearly, and all the songs are japanese pop that i’ve never listened to

have i gotten better at ddr since leaving school? i’m not sure. it’s difficult to get good at a game that you only play a few times a year. it’s also difficult to know if you’re making progress, because you don’t remember precisely how good you were the last time you played. i would like to say that the game feels easier now, that i am more in-control and read / react faster now and that maybe trying out dance has helped, but also my scores have not increased that much so maybe the improvement is all in my head

what i can say for certain is that nowadays i focus a lot less on the gameplay than i used to. my mind often wanders and i pay attention to other parts of the experience, like how good the music sounds and what the person i’m playing with is struggling on. meanwhile when i first started it took all my concentration just to read the arrows off my own screen and move accordingly

lately i’ve been thinking about what you can learn about people by playing games with them. for instance: when i play ddr with B i only hear his footsteps and not my own. he likes to stomp hard on all the tiles, as if to be sure of his steps, in the same way he desperately wants to be certain of everything else he does. meanwhile i like to step on tiles in the same way i type on keyboards - treading as lightly as possible, so that oftentimes other people don’t even realize anything is happening. you could say that B gravitates towards loudness as a form of self-assurance, while i gravitate towards silence because i’m afraid of leaving marks

or as another example: when i introduced K to ddr she was immediately better than me despite having zero experience, and she moved more freely than anyone i’d ever seen because she didn’t lean on the bar for support. at the time i thought wow, i guess ddr is just trivial for people who are good at dance. then i played with other dance friends who struggled heavily, and i couldn’t understand why until one of them explained K is really good at footwork. i suck at footwork and am better at hits and rolls

i think i want to build my own ddr machine in spring 2025 (and i am mentioning this for accountability reasons). it will be my first independent hardware project! sometimes i find this slightly daunting, and then i think to myself, if hudzah can use sonnet 3.5 to build a nuclear fusor with 0 prior hardware experience, i have no excuse to not build my own ddr machine