Rhythm Games: Popular enough for an encore?

Introduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX0wCyvn3pI

The above video is a short gameplay section of the 1996 rhythm game PaRappa the Rapper, which is often considered the first true rhythm game.¹ The core gameplay of modern rhythm games is already present: the player hits the right buttons as they appear on screen, following the rhythm of the music track. According to Michael Austin rhythm games are video games in which the most meaningful interaction with the game is musical.² In the West the most well-known rhythm games are Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band, games mostly played on consoles at home. In Japan on the other hand, rhythm games are more numerous, far more popular and more varied. In this article we want to research the popularity of rhythm games over the years, starting with arcade rhythm games and evolving into mobile games which have captured a large international player base.

Tutorial- Status Quaestionis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXZSR2kfqvY a video showcasing the popularity of arcade rhythm games in Japan, here DANCERUSH STARDOM (Konami, 2018), as well as the similarity of the gameplay with the earlier example of PaRappa the Rapper

In the grand scheme of things video game studies, or ludology (from Latin ludus meaning game or play), is a very young academic field of study. Though the birth of video games is often dated to 1961 with the creation of Spacewar! It would take academics many decades to notice, and even longer for them not to feel the need to justify the study of their object. Even in a 2013 review of Kiri Miller's Playing Along, Enoch Jacobus still referred to film critic Roger Ebert's comments on the question of whether video games were art.³ The early years of the field were dominated by the struggle between ludologists, who understood games as systems of rules, and narratologists, who understood them as narratives.⁴ What is important for this article, however, is the subfield of ludomusicology. Only going back to the beginning of the 21^st^ century ludomusicology perhaps got its start with Matthew Belinkie's historical overview of video game music, tellingly titled "Video Game Music: Not Just Kid Stuff". The term Ludomusicology, a portmanteau of ludology and musicology, was coined in 2007 by Guillaume Laroche and redefined by Roger Moseley in 2013.⁵ Important work has already been done in the field by Karen Collins, William Cheng, Isabella van Elferen, Tim Summers and many others.⁶ The questions that seem to concern scholars relate to immersion, performance, diegesis and whether playing music games makes you a better musician.⁷ What is perhaps surprising is the relative lack of studies focusing on rhythm games specifically and those that do tend to limit themselves to Guitar Hero, Rock Band or Dance Dance Revolution.⁸ Horror games are, by contrast, a very popular study object.⁹ Quantitative research into video game music is a rarity.¹⁰ This is somewhat unfortunate because, as Faisal and Peltoniemi state, digital tools could help us get "the bigger picture" of the game industry, which has quickly become a part of many people's daily lives, rather than limiting ourselves to the study of individual games.¹¹ It is precisely here that we would like to contribute to the burgeoning field of ludomusicology.

Start Live! Methodology

Initially, we wanted to research the popularity of rhythm games over the years, meaning the popularity of arcade rhythm games and mobile games. However, precise numbers of people using arcades and especially about which games are played are unreachable, if they even exist. We thus decided to focus on mobile games. This, however, comes with its own set of difficulties.

Stage 1

First, download numbers and sales numbers of mobile-based apps, Japan's most popular form of rhythm games, are either hidden by developing companies or only given in vague categories, like 1 million+, 500K+ , etc. Apple's app store is unavailable on a non-IOS-pc thus the app is difficult for us to scrape, which is especially regrettable since online research shows that Apple phones dominate the Japanese market.¹² While the Microsoft Store and Google's play store do have a pc version it relies heavily on Javascript making it hard for us to scrape and even more difficult to scrape the Japanese version of these apps since we get referred back to the local version with each attempt. On top of that, when looking for rhythm games on the play store, another problem presented itself: the app would only suggest the newest, most downloaded, or "recommended for you" apps when looking for "rhythm games", leaving an incomplete and biased list.

Gameplay of the mobile game THE iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls: Starlight Stage

Stage 2

Reviews were considered as a second possible avenue for research. The app store provides a space on their platform where users can leave reviews making researching scores to determine popularity possible. This too has its downsides: certain apps remind users to leave reviews, which skews the data in their favour. Another problem is that reviews can be tampered with by companies: they could delete or hide negative reviews or even buy positive reviews. For these reasons, this data will not be used in our research.

To avoid these possible biases we looked for third-party sites we might use instead. Three very prominent rhythm games that we wanted to research for this article have fan-made wikis. As websites, they can both be accessed via the pc and scraped. The three wikis in question are also quite similar, facilitating easy comparison, but contain no data of value to our research, so we decided against using them.

Stage 3

As for scrapable sources of data, we considered a relatively suitable alternative: Steam. The digital game distribution platform Steam offers a PC-accessible platform and player data. The data on the number of players can be found on sites separate from the steam store.This data, however, is of the number of currently active players, complicating comparison between Japanese players and players in other regions. By contrast the Steam platform does have other scrapable data even if this isn't very representative of the (Japanese) user base and will not lead us to many conclusions, for reasons mentioned later. But this way we can still conduct our research, although in a different way and we can show how this research could be conducted if given access to the right data.

Gameplay of BeatSaber, one of the more popular rhythm games on Steam.

One aspect of our original research plans that we could not pursue concerns the Japanese market, narrowing it down to a specific region will be impossible using Steam since Steam does not distinguish between regions when collecting data. On top of that, Steam, a platform whose user base is mainly limited to Western players, also consists mostly of Western games. The non-western games it supports are few in number, Japanese games being no exception. This is compounded by the fact that games in Japan are mostly played on either mobile or console rather than on pc.¹³

Another roadblock is the download method on pc. While Steam is an important gaming platform for pc it does not have a monopoly. Sites like gog.com and itch.io for example also provide game downloads, though sometimes through selling Steam keys. Moreover, game publishers like EA and Epic Games have their own platforms on which they often try to publish games exclusively even if only for a period of time so as to retain a greater part of the sales profits. These players will thus not show up in the Steam data.

What we can do is use the tags associated with rhythm games, and other data found on Steam, to create a sort of profile of rhythm games and compare them to the top most played games on the platform.

Chance Time! Quantitative research

To start, we scraped a list of all rhythm games: top 100 most played games, most played rhythm games, and all the available information such as title, initial price, tags, developers etc,. Using OpenRefine, the data was cleaned. Making use of tags and facets, we can then understand the data better through visualisation:

We compiled the data about the tags into two pie charts which are presented below. The chart on the left visualises the most frequent tags of the top 100 most played games on Steam at the moment of scraping and the chart on the right depicts the 15 most common tags relating to rhythm games. The reason why we worked with tags instead of genres is because tags are added by the players themselves while genres are more broad, and the tags describe in detail what the experience of playing the game is like. Though this choice results in some vague/subjective tags such as: "sfeervol" and "geweldige muziek". It should be noted that the percentages of tags are a representation of how common the tags are instead of how many games are represented by the tags. This is due to the fact that we are working with the top 15 most common tags rather than all the tags.

What we noticed from looking at these tags is that the tags associated with the top currently played games revolve a lot around "multiplayer" tags such as multiplayer, co-op, online co-op and PvP. However the top tags connected to rhythm games do not include those tags since rhythm games are mostly single-player games as seen from the tags like single-player and casual. This could be the reason for rhythm games' lack of popularity on Steam.

Comparing the list of top current most played games and the top rhythm games, we can see that even the most popular rhythm game is not in the top played games on Steam. Not only that, the amount of daily players for the top 3 rhythm games are only about 0,69% of the top 3 of all games. Specifically, only 6.905 players compared to 1.003.804 players a day. The numbers for top rhythm games could also be exaggerated due to some popular non-musical games being listed as rhythm games.

We also scraped and compared the reviews for all the rhythm games on Steam we collected and the reviews for the top 100 games on Steam. These reviews are given by players in the form of either voting "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", Steam then orders them into a couple of vague categories, such as "overweldigend positief" and "grotendeels positief". The total number of reviews submitted differ substantially between the top 100 currently most played games, regardless of genre, and the rhythm games we were able to analyse. In which case rhythm games are getting only about 0.70% of the review-count we observed in the top 100.

An exception to this pattern are the top 3 currently most played games (again, regardless of genre) and the top 3 rhythm games. In that case we see that the average review-count of the top 3 rhythm games is closer to the review-count of the top 3 currently most played games. Concretely the rhythm games only receive an amount of reviews equal to 3.04% of the average review-count observed in the top 3. This is probably because a very popular game surrounding reaction time, Sekiro, slipped in and has bumped up the average of these top 3 games.

Rewards\ Results

Just from these, we can tell that rhythm games are not popular with steam users: no rhythm games are in the top 100 most played games and even the number of daily players is small by comparison. If we were to give a reason, it would have to be the popularity of multiplayer on steam. If this research has taught us anything, it is that Steam is mostly popular for multiplayer PC gaming.