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Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, "Dance Dance Revolution" (Boss Fight Books, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Marshall Po
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- [01:07]
Rudrarth Inders
Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books in Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Here we dive into exciting new releases that explore digital and analog games, their design, their cultural impact, and the social and economic forces shaping the gaming landscape and our industry. I'm your host, Rudrarth Inders, professor for Game Studies and Game Design with University of Applied Science, Neue Ulm, Germany. Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, please please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you prefer. It really helps others discover us. Also, please feel free to share this episode with your community or gaming groups. And now back to today's topic. I'm very thrilled to welcome Jessica Doyle and Jordan Ferguson, co authors of Dance Dance Revolution, a book that takes us on an astonishing journey through one of the most iconic rhythm games of all time. From arcade heyday to underground communities, Dance Dance Revolution tells the story of how a game without characters or quests revolutionized play, music and culture. So welcome to the show, Jessica and Jordan.
- [02:27]
Jessica Doyle
Hello and thank you for having us.
- [02:30]
Jordan Ferguson
Thank you for having us.
- [02:31]
Rudrarth Inders
To begin, could you please both introduce yourselves and tell us what drew you to writing a book about Dance Dance Revolution? What makes this game such a lasting cultural touchstone for you?
- [02:44]
Jessica Doyle
So I'll go first because I had the idea in the first place. So my name is Jessica Doyle. I am a writer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. I also have a PhD in city planning. Which does not qualify you to write about video games at all, unless it's SimCity, which I think that's been done. But I found out several years ago that it was actually late 2017. So it's been a while that Boss Fight Books was having an open call, which is what they do every so often they'll say, we are looking to hear pitches on games that we haven't done before. And I went and I thought about it and I said, okay, what game would I really love to write about? And I should say that the Boss Fight Books approaches vary. Some of them have a more personal approach. For example, there was another book in the series on Parappa the Rapper, which has some overlap with Dance Dance Revolution. In fact, Jordan talked about, when he in the writing, talks about how Dance Dance Revolution's origin story involves Parappa the Rapper. But that book is very different from ours because it's a very personal story of what that game meant to that author. And we did not do that. We did more of a straight history. But if you're going to spend that much time writing about a game, you really need to love the game. And so I was thinking about what game do I really love and want to go back to? And I thought about being in Times Square, New York in 2001 and my friend. My friend and I went to an arcade just off on 46 Nath and we would play Dance Dance Revolution. It was most bizarre, colorful, challenging, not in the. In. Not in the Nintendo hard sense, but just in the sense that it was a full body workout game. And it was the feeling of joy that I remembered from that. That was what I wanted to get back to now. At that time I was in graduate school, so I was not in a position to be writing a book about anything except my dissertation on my own. And Jordan, as he will tell you, is the author of another book, the 33 and a third on J. Dilla's Donuts. So I knew he had experience with a project like this. So I said, hey Jordan, would you like to write a book with me? And I will let him take it from there.
- [05:19]
Jordan Ferguson
So yeah, Jessica and I actually met online.
- [05:24]
Jessica Doyle
And in fact have never met in person to this day. We're working on it.
- [05:28]
Jordan Ferguson
Never. Never in person. Yeah. After my. My book about J. Dilla had come out, Jessica just emailed me. She liked something I had written about the Book pitching process and we kind of recognized certain similarities in ourselves and our interests and just struck up an old fashion correspondence and we would just check in every so often. And I was, to be honest, searching for a project when she came to me with this. And if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't know. My own experience with Dance Dance Revolution was intense and brief. It was. I grew up in an area that was across the river from Detroit, Michigan, I should say. I'm based in Toronto, Canada. I grew up in an area called Windsor, Ontario, which shares a river and an international border with the United States. So I would hear a lot of media from the Detroit area. So electronic music was a sort of like intriguing, a sort of intriguing mystery to me. Like I grew up in an area that was classic rock and hair metal, but you turn on the radio at 10pm and hear these sounds coming from Detroit. This is an era where techno was getting established, house was getting house music was getting established in Chicago and throughout the American Midwest. So I was. Electronic music was becoming, and dance music was becoming something that I was very much intrigued by, even though I didn't really. My closest means to touching it was to buy a copy of DDR Max for the PlayStation 2 and a cheap foam pad. And I was one of you know, thousands of kids who had that set up in our, you know, basements and rec rooms and four hours a day just pinging off song after song and. But that was my only real exposure. I grew up in a small area, we didn't have a lot of arcades. I maybe only ever saw one cabinet in person in my entire life as, as a person who enjoys games. So when Jessica came to me with this project and we just started, she started telling me what she was interested in, the type of thing she wanted to explore with the game. I became very intrigued and enamored with this idea of how we would pitch a story about a game that as you said, has no quests or characters, but has maintained such a dedicated and passionate fan base for like 20 to 30 years. And we worked on the pitch and I, for the second time in my life, I knew we had something like, I knew there was something here. I knew when we sent this in, I knew we would get accepted. It was just, it was, the idea was that good because the game is that interesting.
- [08:19]
Rudrarth Inders
Your book covers everything from the game's origin to its artistic and social legacy. So I wonder how did you go about structuring such a wide ranging narrative? Were there any surprises or revelations within your Research.
- [08:36]
Jessica Doyle
Oh, yes. So our pitch was originally pretty retrospective because neither of us had touched the game in close to a decade by the time we wrote the pitch. Like Jordan, I had a home set up, but I wasn't using it anymore. In fact, I think I had donated it to a local rec center at some point several years earlier. So we kind of assumed very wrongly that most people who we would be talking to would have the same experience as us. As in, they played it sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. They remembered it with great affection. Our pitch was originally about that remembrance. Like, how did this game that look so ephemeral sparked so much joy in us and other people? And then I started going. Both of us started researching, and I went to a local anime convention here in Atlanta and popped into the video game room, and they had a whole DDR setup. And not only DDR, but they also had games like Sound Voltex and U Beat. And the one that. With the drums, Taiko no Tatsu Gen. I just blanked on the name for a second, which is literally, you're banging on drums. It's a rhythm game. It's very cute, popping music. There's a whole fleet of these games. It's not just a DDR scene. It's a rhythm game scene, and it's an active scene. And I was particularly lucky that in Atlanta, there is a particularly vibrant and active rhythm game community. Jordan has had less luck in Toronto, so. But finding out about that spurred us to start saying, okay, wait, we were wrong. Other people are still playing DDR. People are still very much playing DDR. And that sent us down all sorts of different rabbit holes. Jordan, like, you did a lot of research on the freestyle movement and what happened with that, if you want to talk about that.
- [10:54]
Jordan Ferguson
Yeah. As far as how we structured, something that quickly became apparent was a very large topic. We were fortunate enough, I think, that we both kind of, you know, if you take the. Forgive the analogy, the. The diamond of DDR, with all its different facets. We were each kind of drawn to different areas of that, fortunately, and with the both of us. So Jessica focused a lot more kind of on the communities that developed around the game itself, the people who kept it going. I veered more for kind of. When Jessica talks about freestyle, you're talking about this sort of split that happens in the game's player base. And this is something that became really fascinating to me because I think for your average person with a passing familiarity of Dance Dance Revolution, they're thinking of the dance Portion. They're remembering people doing handstands and running up the screen and things like that. You know, what they called the Matrix walk back then, which got banned as a competitive move because they kept breaking components. But I think that's what people think of. And that became known as freestyle because it was more about artistic performance. How are you going to make this engaging to a viewing audience? And over time, what you see happen is the performance moves from sort of artistic to athletic. You have much more. It's much more about raw data, no room for error. The number is the number, your score is your score. And I became there's a divide there. There are people and how much the athletic portion kind of dwarfed the artistic and sort of consumed it and just became the standard of quality for, you know, DDR performance. I became really interested in that. And we were also fortunate in that even if we were talking about the same topic, whether that was, you know, the game originated in Japan. So one of the hurdles, and we talk about this in the book a bit, one of the hurdles that the game sort of had early on was you have to play it in public. When the game launched, this was purely a public game at a time when arcades were on the decline, which is another sort of facet of the dial, all these sort of angles that the game sort of presents when you start to think about it. And there was a concern among Konami, the game's publisher, regarding if you could convince the Japanese populace to potentially make a fool of themselves by dancing in public and how big a hurdle that would be. So we took a moment to talk about sort of public dance performance in Japan throughout the years. Jessica talked about para para and sort of synchronized dance cultures like that. I talked about hip hop and breakdancing because that was my area of expertise. We were really fortunate in that the things we wanted to talk about, the things we were most excited to talk about, complimented but didn't really. Nobody fought for a topic really as far as, like the construction of. Of the book. And there was a lot to talk about, as you said.
- [13:59]
Jessica Doyle
The other surprise I should mention, because I said we pitched the book in 2018, we actually had a manuscript ready to go in late 2019. And then the whole world got surprised by a pandemic. And one of the things, when we were able to come back to the book, one of the things we had to talk about was I remember saying to Gabe, our editor at one point, for almost every other video game anybody will write about, the pandemic was a godsend people needed to be in their homes, communicating online rather than in person. It was a boon for a lot of social games, strategy games. We have the one game that is very badly affected. Like you couldn't go out and play DDR during the worst of the pandemic, and people restarted surprisingly early, Although I had multiple people tell me, you have no idea how awful it is to play DDR in a mask. So we were a little bit worried that the communities we were taught we originally reached out to in 2018, 2019, by the time we restarted work on the book four years later, that they didn't exist anymore. And in fairness, some of them didn't. There were some casualties, but the community was remarkably resilient.
- [15:16]
Jordan Ferguson
Yeah, one thing that a reader may not realize is just how long we worked on the book for, because there was the minor inconvenience of a global pandemic in the middle of it, and we felt it would have been for this game specifically. You can't ignore that this is a game that was designed to be played in public. And the most vibrant communities are conventions, arcades, tournaments, places where people gather. So when all that gets taken away, it just felt really dishonest to us to not address that in a book about a game like this.
- [15:51]
Jessica Doyle
And I should add, in terms of community building, I know we're going to get to that some. But when people get together to play der, somebody's bringing a machine, somebody's bringing up a setup. It is a commitment and people have to think about how are we going to get the power. It's not quite the same as hosting a Smash Brothers tournament. There's not as much flexibility. Somebody has to be responsible for, for a lot of equipment. So the people who make these communities run are very dedicated.
- [16:20]
Rudrarth Inders
Actually, thanks for your for your answer because it builds the perfect bridge to our next talking point. Now, if we talk about the DDR community, which is always a bit strange for me as a German talking about DDR because of our former brothers in the eastern part of Germany shortened as DDR, the community. Well, modding tournaments, fan remixes. So what does the very vibrant culture surrounding the game tell us about creativity, fandom and, yeah, ownership in the world of rhythm games.
- [16:54]
Jessica Doyle
So that was another aspect of DDR that we had not appreciated going into this. Just so I can recap, recently, for your audience's information, Dance Dance Revolution is made by Konami. There have been quite a few variants. For example, a lot of people will be familiar with mobile rhythm games which have proliferated in the Last three to five years. I'll let Jordan talk about that more later if he wants. But pressing buttons to a rhythm it's hard to patent. However, the dance pad and the arrows and that set up that's easier to patent. And Konami fought a lot of lawsuits in the 2010. In the 2000s there was a game called in the Groove that basically no longer exists because they lost their lawsuits. There was another game by a Korean manufacturer called Pump it up which has survived. And in fact in say South America, Pump it up is much better known than Dance Dance Revolution. And then there is Stepmania which is basically an op. Began as an open source version of Dance Dance Revolution. It's been around since the early 2000s and there is now a cabinet for it called Stepmania X or everybody calls it Step Mania X.
- [18:20]
Jordan Ferguson
So.
- [18:21]
Jessica Doyle
But the other thing is you're technically not supposed to have a home machine. Lots of people do, we talk to them, but Konami doesn't want to connect to them, doesn't want to service them. They're only supposed to go through arcades. So a lot of the fan activity outside Japan has kind of existed at a right angle to Konami for more than a decade at this point because Konami, with the exception of two arcade chains and now it's down to one, at least in North America, Konami really hasn't been shipping out cabinets. They stopped providing for the home market several years ago. So everybody sort. It's not illegal, but it's not officially, officially sanctioned. So there is sort of a get away with it, rogue like atmosphere around the fans community.
- [19:25]
Jordan Ferguson
Yeah, the community aspect is something Jessica spent a fair bit more time devoted to in the book because she had. The communities were stronger in her area than they were in mine. There are players, there are machines to be found in Toronto, but for a city of this size it's surprisingly small. And I think it speaks one of the, you know the. Of all these different stories that we kind of sub stories that we found in researching the history of the game is the. I wouldn't call it ambivalent, but the like very laissez faire attitude of Konami as the manufacturer versus the player base. It never really seemed like with no, I'll say it, it never really seemed like Konami gave much care to the North American or European market for the game. They were very focused on the domestic market. I think they were happy that there was an audience for it, but they were never really going to service it. And anytime Konami did anything to acknowledge the International player base was the earth shattering. Whether it was, you know, incorporating EMUs, which is like their online score tracking system, when they allowed for that to happen in North America so players could put their scores up against other players around the world, was traditionally a Japanese service. When they expanded it to International, it was a huge acknowledgment and very kind of atypical for how Konami had behaved in the past. Most of what you see from the North American and International player base is in pretty much direct defiance to Konami. If you won't do it, we will do it ourselves. And that is one of the most fascinating and impressive things to me about this game and the culture it fostered is that it's really all these stories about groups of people creating, identifying a need and creating something where something was needed. You look at tournaments like Valkyrie Dimension, which is a tournament specifically for, you know, women and non men. Non men and. Or Freestyle Takeover, which is a group from California that wanted to reclaim the style of DDR play that they thought was getting subsumed by the very athletic style of play. Or the people who suddenly have forced themselves to learn wiring and you know, electrical engineering because they become the de facto people who go to conventions. And like Jessica said, when you're dragging very heavy, very large pieces of electrical equipment across the United States, you want. Somebody's got to be able to set them up and repair them if needed because Konami is not going to do it. You can't send your machine off to Konami for repairs or warranty because you were never supposed to have it in the first place. So all of these sort of needs that are identified by the fan community who then work to fill those needs and support each other over their mutual love of this game is just, it's, it's mind blowing to see and really, really impressive. And I can't think of a lot of other communities that have that sort of. Sorry, not a lot of the other games that have that sort of community built around them to that degree where it's, it's one part playing, but it's also like, you know, soldering wires in a convention hall type thing.
- [22:55]
Jessica Doyle
Right. I think a lot of times when we talk about fan remixing or fan ownership or fan creativity about, around a video game, we're talking about more jumping off from the story or the strategy or the gameplay. We're not talking about the literal game. With DDR, it is often when you're taking ownership, you're taking ownership of the literal machine. The, the. You're pulling off the panels and making sure those wires work together because the, the, excuse me, the dance pads take a lot of abuse and somebody has to be responsible for them. And it's there was a point where I, there's a point in the, in the book where I say, nobody set out when they started playing this game. Nobody was like, oh, I'm gonna pick up a whole lot of knowledge of electrical engineering along the way. But that's what happens. It's a much more tactile approach to reclaiming ownership of a game than I think is standard now in a world where most of our interactions with games are software and cloud based.
- [24:04]
Rudrarth Inders
Now, before we continue, a quick note to our listeners. If you're involved in running an academic program in game design, development or game studies, this podcast might be the perfect place to share your vision. Our listeners include engaged scholars, educators, students and professionals across the field. Consider placing a short promotional segment to connect with this thoughtful international audience passionate about games playing and research. Now, finally, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the broader landscape of maybe game studies or game research today. Where do you see exciting developments or challenges, especially when it comes to researching music, games or games as cultural phenomena?
- [24:49]
Jordan Ferguson
I will say I don't know that I necessarily feel qualified to answer that question. This is the longest piece I've ever written about a video game and I would not consider myself a member of the academy. I'm at best critic and a researcher, a storyteller if nothing else. But I was thinking about this question today and I think what I can kind of speak to is just the how we think about. I'm going to stumble over my words. Forgive me, Rudolph, but I have been very fortunate to live in a time and be of an age where I have seen games in a number of what would once be considered niche interest, progress, and get the sort of critical attention, serious critical consideration that they deserve. I have been a gamer my entire life. I was someone who my parents bought a Colecovision for the family when I was 7, I got an NES when I was 11, the Genesis when I was 15, and I so on and so forth, up to being a much older man with a PlayStation 5 and a million mobile games on my phone. So I've seen how games have broadened both their narrative sophistication and just sort of the systems that they use at the same time. I've seen, and this is maybe what I feel more confident speaking to. I've seen sort of the contraction of the media landscape dedicated toward that sort of serious consideration. And I think one of the biggest challenges is just the lack of outlets that we see anymore and a lot of sort of the shuttering of those traditional outlets and places for that sort of thinking to go. But even though I am one of the first people to recoil at the Internet as a whole, I do still have. I. I maintain the optimism of the dream of the Internet. And I see this a fair bit with music criticism where while the outlets are disappearing to some extent, the people are moving to platforms and whether that's TikTok or YouTube or Substack, and you can still find a lot of that good writing and analysis in those arenas. And I think it's only a matter of time and it may have already started happening and I just haven't seen it where sort of you see, you've already seen it in music. I've started to see it in comics and anime and places like that. I think it's only a matter of time if it hasn't already begun to happen. Where games, all facets of them, from the development, the stories of their development to narrative study to, you know, had interaction between player and the game, you'll start to see people moving kind of more to these platforms. And I'm. I'll even go so far as to say, I would even go so far as to say I'm optimistic or I have, I have the hope, I have the long shot hope that people will even move from these platforms that are owned by other people and start making things themselves and creating their own homes for this sort of discussion. And I think the leaps that have been made kind of in the academic field and giving people more spaces to talk about these things, whether that's in universities, academic journals, places like that, anything that kind of moves people away from building their own platforms is a welcome development, if that made any sense.
- [28:11]
Jessica Doyle
So I'm going to go in a somewhat different direction and try and focus more on the academic side of things. Like I said, My PhD is not in cultural studies. I've read a little bit about it, but so, you know, to apply as much salt as you see fit. I do think a general challenge and I think we hit it more because like we said, we're talking about a game with no story. We're talking about a game with no. You don't really have characters, you don't even have a narrative exactly. You just play your three songs and then either you get a bonus stage or you're done, depending on what your settings are. So we don't have Necessarily a lot to analyze about what the game is saying. Exactly. Now, I will say that in our first iteration of the game, and I'm sorry, of the book. First iteration of the book, the 2019 iteration, we had a final chapter. I should say I had a final chapter because we split it up by chapters. So this one was all mine. And I was trying to wrestle with the cultural legacies. What was. What was Gantz Dance Revolution saying about the culture it was in and what was it saying to the culture it was in? So you had these kind of thorny issues about the fact that this was a Japanese game taking music that was like pretty much almost all pop music these days, taken from an African American legacy, but filtered through a lot, especially in the early iterations of the game, Eurobeat, which was done. A lot of it was done by Italian DJs. So it was kind of this globalized mashup. And depending on your perspective, this was either this lovely kind of amalgam of creativity or it was kind of willful ignorance and exploitation. And I was trying to work that through and being aware of the fact that at the time that DDR originally made itself debut was right at the time when there were. There were. There was a lot of anti globalization protests. You know, DDR came out within a year of the Battle of Seattle, that sort of thing. And when we decided, when we resumed work on the book after, after Covid, one of the first things I said to Jordan was, we are getting rid of that chapter. We are. We are throwing it in the bin. Because I didn't think I had done a good job. And I'm still wrestling with how much. How much of that was necessary and vital and how much of it was overshooting. And I think, and this may be more a statement of my own limitations than would be applicable to people who have engaged with this stuff more deeply. So, again, apply your salt. But I do think there's kind of this ongoing question in cultural studies about how much is any given cultural product, say, how much is it influencing the user and how much is the user using it? So I'll give you an example not related to DDR at all. When the 50 shades of gray book series was very popular, I remember seeing a lot of hot takes, if you will, about how this book promoted a very retrograde idea of female sexuality and male female relations. I also saw a few hot takes about how it promoted this sort of minimalist, what we would now call Airbnb style, upstairs scale consumerism. And both of those analysis. I would say, have quite a few grains of truth in them. But then you get to the question of does that mean that the people who read Fifty Shades and Gray, did they come out of that experience more misogynist and consumerist? And when I used to be, I still am. I it's not as active as it used to be, but I used to But I am a reviewer for the Singles Youth Box and we have had quite a few discussions over the years about when you have a piece of media that has a certain point of view, do you, do you have to push back or embrace that point of view? Is someone listening to it necessarily pushing back against or embracing that point of view? And what does that mean? And because DDR is so narratively empty, we kind of have to ask the question even more strongly, like, what does it actually mean? If people are playing a lot of DDR, how is it affecting them? How is it not affecting? And I do think there's a potential related issue here and hopefully this is not as much of a problem in Germany, but in the United States, I know there is just this very intense pressure to publish or perish where as an academic you are required to do research and show research, whether or not and you know, hope I should say that almost all the academics I know are very passionate about their work, including I know some folks who specialize in game studies. But I do wonder if, like, do we focus so much on the procedure of analysis that we don't know if the but just have a there there to have to to make the analysis worthwhile? And I don't know that that necessarily exists every time with every game.
- [34:23]
Rudrarth Inders
Thanks for lots of thought for that day. So Jessica Jordan, thank you both so much for joining me today and for this thoughtful and also rhythmic dive of Dance Dance Revolution was my pleasure. So thank you again and have a good day.
- [34:40]
Jessica Doyle
Thank you so much.
- [34:42]
Rudrarth Inders
Dear listeners, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you're an author or editor in Game studies and would like to discuss your latest work, reach out to me@rudolph.industoglemail.com you can also find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky under amestudies. And please don't forget, head over to gamestudiesmerchde for a game studies hoodie. If you want to support this very show, always keep it playful and goodbye.