Flutterby™! : Gamify square dance

Copied from a Facebook thread about how to gamify square dancing to make it possibly appeal to today's generation of video game obsessed kids:

I think the huge component of most modern games is how it fits into a social context: talk to people about why they game, and often it's about making connections to people, whether that's in different part of the world or dragging computers into one space to play.

I don't think the challenge is as much about adapting square dancing to the virtual world as it is to finding that thing that'll get a critical mass of them up on the floor. Make a video game that appeals to them and you'll end up with the next World of Warcraft (if you happen to be successful), make something different and you're not competing with World of Warcraft, you're competing on the novelty of "hey, bumping into actual people!"

I think the path forward is to create a culture about which more people say "Hey, I want to play in *that* space!" Reworking a real world experience into the virtual doesn't do that: We don't seek out virtual reality, we seek out virtual surreality. We're going there for things that can't/don't happen in the real world.

I also think that... Square dancing is a very D/s activity. I read a great essay once about how dance is the art form of totalitarian societies, how when we think of the Soviet Union we think of goose stepping soldiers patrolling the wall, when we think of North Korea, it's huge parade squares full of soldiers, or dancers, doing intricate routines which interlock with each other. When we think of factory work of 50-100 years ago, we think of rows and rows of people endlessly repeating the same precise task.

We've had a social shift, though, and many of us now think of those tasks as joyless, the thing that can be automated away so we can participate in the endeavors that don't involve rote.

I am honored that my fellow dancers pushed me to being a caller. I've also found that, in being a caller, I tend to relate more to other callers, and my relationship to square dancing has become one of service rather than participation. I wonder if we have a generational shift towards activities are self-organizing and peer-based, rather than hierarchical. That celebrate innovation by individuals, not just the elite. And that part of why kids these days aren't getting into square dancing is that we, as humanity, have moved on to different paradigms.