What Games Teach – Dance

Here is something you don’t hear often. Some time ago I took a Salsa course with my girlfriend. It was the first time I seriously took a formal dance lesson. Throughout the course I frequently had flashbacks of how video-games work, especially fighting games like Soulcalibur.

Formal dancing is very much about learning and executing a series of moves in rhythm to the music and together with a partner. When you learn a dance, you learn certain routines – pre-set sequences of moves (combos?) so you can concentrate at learning to execute them intuitively. With time, as you learn the moves, you can go on and improvise. You break the routines down into individual moves and arrange them on the fly to a custom performance. Of course, some moves may require a specific stance so you need a good understanding of which moves can be linked together. At some point, a different level of difficulty kicks in – you need to communicate your next move to your partner. This is what you call “leading”. The leading person gives subtle hints to their partner so the partner knows which move comes next.

Surprisingly, this is pretty much exactly how fighting games work. In fighting games, each players can execute certain moves. Each move has a distinct pattern. The other player’s task is to recognize or even anticipate the next move and to execute the right answer to it. Soulcaliubur distinguishes itself by having very long moves that flow into each other, as well as a number of different modes and stances. This emphasizes the similarity to dancing.

This game design pattern isn’t unique to fighting games. A lot of action games use similar ideas. For instance, many games include boss fights that require the player to memorize and react to an attack pattern of an AI enemy.

But there are even more fundamental similarities. The first difficulty in learning to danced is to familiarize yourself with the moves. Funny enough, dancing is not especially complex. It is pretty easy to understand how a move goes on an cognitive level. But to execute that move is something entirely different. When dancing, you don’t have the time to analytically recall where your feet and arms go. So you need to learn the moves on a more intuitive, muscle-memory level. The way to do this is by repeating the moves over and over again until they come automatically. This enables you to fluently move from one move to another and frees up your brain to think about the overall performance. Doing the dance lessons it was fascinating for me to watch myself going from the cognitive to the instinctive execution of moves.

Games are quite similar in that regard. The allure of action games lies in the intuitive control of elements on the screen. As you master an action game, you progressively delegate entire levels of game-play decisions to muscle-memory in order to free up your brain for more strategic thinking. First it’s more about the individual button presses, with time you end up executing entire attack strategies without consciously thinking about them.

Both, dancing and action-games are most satisfying when you stop thinking about and start relying on simply feeling them.

But of course there are some differences. For instance, a big aspect of dance is music and rhythm. While action games do have certain rhythm aspects they are hardly comparable to music. Music and dance are an aesthetic experience. They focus very much on harmony and regularity. Games focus on interactivity and challenge instead.

Expressing yourself is also an important aspect of dance. You could say it is pretty much the whole idea about it. Game systems offer less opportunities for expression. They are challenges and idea is to overcome them. There is often only a very narrow path of “doing it right”. If somebody manages to discover and exploit some wiggle room on that path, it is considered a noteworthy exception.

There is one more obvious difference. Games, especially fighting games, are competitive while dancing is cooperative. That’s why it may seem absurd to compare the two. But the difference is a superficial one. I found this in Rules of Play and it stuck with me: games are by their very nature cooperative, even if you end up killing each other. After all, the participation in games happens on a voluntary basis (ideally). The game also is kept alive by both players actively engaging in the game. It always takes two, no matter if you fight or dance.