[description: video demonstrating playing DDR naked, from various angles]
Have you ever played DDR naked? There's nothing quite like the feeling! I gave myself the gift this Christmas of revisiting an old and beloved pastime - with two new dance pads! I was first introduced to DDR by some friends in high school. My initial reaction to it was to avoid it out of embarrassment - me not being the sort of person who likes to get up in front of people and dance (although I've learned that this is actually a good way to do it, since the arrows give you a sort of script to follow - it's like dancing on training wheels).
I went out on a limb and tried it again in college, mainly because it gave me an excuse to interact with a girl I fancied within the context of a social environment (i.e., it gave me the illusion of having a life). I discovered at this time that DDR was actually quite a lot of fun, and subsequently got hooked on it, dragging my best friend into my obsession. We bought dance pads and hooked them up to a projection screen, and danced with anyone who happened along and wished to join us. At the height of our obsession, we swapped out Dance Dance Revolution with StepMania, a DDR-based computer application with hundreds of songs.
Following the inevitable scattering of friends post-graduation, my dance time dwindled, as the dance pads I had in my possession gradually wore out. There were periods when I would run DDR tracks purely for the exercise, even without a controller connected (not a bad idea, if you don't care about the grades). Such an experience even made it into my Daily Nude Videos project [broken link] from eight years ago. Since then, though, I've let my DDR Max discs collect dust on the shelf, and have resigned myself to the very infrequent occasion of happening upon a DDR machine "in the wild", so to speak - at an arcade.
Until now, that is. DDR lives again!
