Dance, dance, evolution is gamers’ code for fun
It was Christmas Eve revelry, indeed. The dancing kind. A new kind of dancing in a Beijing arcade on Dec 24, to be precise.
Likely, few participants know there’s a reindeer called Dancer meant to take his annual flight that night every year.
The arcade was crowded by people who’d come to see gamers take turns onstage — or, more precisely, on a 3.75-square-meter video-game footboard. But that’s the stage to their world. E5 Dance, the interactive-dance arcade game created by Aimyunion Technology, has become a sensation among young Chinese gamers since it came out in 2012. Meet China’s “e-dancers”. E-dancers from around the country gathered in Beijing for an e-dancing carnival hosted by the China Electronic Game Super League’s organizing committee in December.
The annual league meeting has since its 2016 inception provided gamers nationwide with competition opportunities.
The league staged six months of preliminary competitions in 229 cities, involving more than 3 million participants. The finals were hosted in Wuhan, Hubei province, in November.
“We come to the carnival just to meet and learn more from other e-dancers, especially those who won prizes in the 2017 finals,” participant Feng Rui says.
The woman from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region danced to Taylor Swift’s Look What You Make Me Do on the footboard with her partner.
Feng says she searched online to find video tutorials that showed her how to groove to certain pieces of background music. She practiced it repeatedly before she performed.
Zhou Ningxin created most of the video tutorials Feng followed on the Chinese video-based social platform Meipai.
Zhou started to post dancing videos on Meipai in June. She soon became a rising star in the online E5 Dance community.
The 23-year-old was a part-time street-dance teacher in the United Kingdom while studying at Birmingham City University.
She encountered an E5 Dance gamer after returning to China in 2017.
Zhou was about to play the claw game at a Beijing arcade when she saw Lin Qiu’an dance.
He has “game danced” for nearly a decade. Zhou asked him how to do it. She told him she’d danced for years. He taught her. “I was clumsy,” Zhou recalls. “I needed to follow the onscreen instructions and use the (footboard) according to a required tempo. That’s different from dancing naturally.” She felt comfortable after a week. “The machine provides a relaxing arena for us to dance. And it’s exciting to play in front of many people in an arcade.”
Lin and Zhou like to wow the crowd.
Zhou enjoys the feeling of “playing a game” rather than “dancing to a song”.
They joined the 2017 China Electronic Game Super League. Then, they won fifth prize at the E5 Dance final in November.
The league’s organizing committee operations director Xiong Yunqi contacted Zhou and recruited her as an officially certificated e-dancer for the league.
Xiong created an official account called “e-dancer” on Meipai in 2016. It has served as a video-sharing platform for all E5 Dance gamers in China.
“Countless gamers play in a huge number of arcades nationwide,” Xiong says.
“But players weren’t cohesive. This account gives gamers a platform to display their skills and provides them with tutorials. It also helps to strengthen their identification with the community.”
The league has certified 13 e-dancers, who are all in their 20s. They will tour the country to perform in various arcades.
Chen Moyan, one of the most popular e-dancers on Meipai, boasts nearly 600,000 followers on that platform alone.
The 21-year-old college student had 3,000 followers a year and a half ago. One of her E5 Dance videos has since received over 5 million views.
“I’m just a dance lover who wants to promote the game’s spirit,” she says.
“I understand it as: ‘Feel free to show yourself. Enjoy the game. Keep fit.’ People should re-evaluate their stereotypes about arcade games. The dance game saves us from a sedentary life.”
Chen is taking her love of dance to a new level.
Her online popularity enabled her to open her own dance studio in Jiangsu province’s Suzhou this summer.
It seems, indeed, to be a dance, dance, evolution.
The machine provides a relaxing arena for us to dance. And it’s exciting to play in front of many people in an arcade.” Zhou Ningxin, a popular e-dancer