The next
time that your parents state that playing videogames is a waste of time and that
it just promotes slothfulness and obesity, you should let them know how erroneous
is their allegation; have any of you ever heard about a game named Dance Dance Revolution?
Dance Dance Revolution—also known
as DDR and formerly known as Dancing Stage in Europe and Australia—is
a series of electronic games of the genre of music produced by the Japanese
entertainment company Konami Kabushiki-Gaisha (“Konami” for short).
This game consists basically in standing on a
platform which has four arrows placed in different directions—up, down, left
and right—and stepping on the corresponding one at the rhythm of any of the
songs you can choose from a playlist that appears in the screen. DDR is
available in both arcade and console game formats.
What has made this game so engaging for people—mostly teenagers—is the
fact that it is the player the one that dances to the music and not only the
character that appears in the videogame; even though it actually can be played using controls, that is
not the idea. In other words, the participant ends up playing a videogame and doing exercise at the same time in a
particularly enjoyable fashion.
Not only does DDR help you drop off a couple of pounds by pressing the
dance steps, but also contributes in the improvement of your reflexes,
increases the speed of your feet and your whole body, facilitates coordination
and develops physical working endurance. These benefits have been taken into
account in such way that even some schools have considered using this game as a
tool for their Physical Education classes.
A concrete example of this proposal is the case of private schools of
West Virginia in the United States, where DDR has been incorporated as a way of
struggling against childhood obesity. Situations like this may make some of us
want to go back to school and show some moves, don’t you think so? What would
happen if this proposal was made here in Chile as well?