I can hear the hardcore gamer contingent scoffing from here. If you doubt for a moment the soul-deep terror that is the virgin Audition experience, go and download the game right now, find a Beat Up room on the Free channel, and request "You're Already Gone." Then come back and finish this article.
I'll wait.
Are you humbled? All right, let's keep going.
I am extremely stubborn. Once I gathered my scattered wits and regained the ability to form a coherent thought, I swore to myself that I was going to crack Audition. No teenybopper was going to scare me away from a game.
Even when you're losing horribly - the continuously updating score on the right side of the screen, ordered by rank, is merciless - Beat Up makes it relatively easy to keep looking cool; all you have to do is make sure you continue to hit the spacebar when the downbeat slides across the screen. You can miss as many arrows as you like, and the game will disapprovingly flash at you, but your impossibly cute avatar will keep looking cool. I struggled along, one song after the other, miss after miss, but I kept my avatar dancing with that spacebar.
And then something astonishing happened: I started to get it. And once I got it, Audition magically shape-changed from being the most horrifying and impenetrable game experience I've ever had into the coolest thing ever.
Slave to the Beat
Audition isn't a casual game, despite the presence of numerous casual markers: short play times, transparent rules, continuous save-free play, an item-based advertising model. Although the rules can be learned in minutes, mastery requires about a month of semi-serious dedication; "pro"-level skills take significantly longer. And, like a standard fantasy-based MMO, if you drop out of regular play, you'll return to find that all of your friends are 10 levels ahead of you and worlds ahead in ability. Your reflexes can atrophy as quickly as embouchure for a musical instrument.
When you find the beat, however, the feeling is incredible. Your keyboard becomes an instrument through which you "play" a pounding, intense rock song. When you claim the highest score, you slide into the lead dancer position, supported by the other players worshiping at the altar of your groove. Whether you're playing backup or lead, Audition reaches deep down into the shared performance experience that has driven homo sapiens to make music and dance since the birth of the species. Beat Up, performed well, closely replicates a creative "flow" state that is almost nirvana - if you release thought and embrace the physical pulse of the music, you're carried along in a fast and furious musical flow that you share with your fellow performers. The game's mechanics encourage this mindset with visual cues and flourishes that reward a steady, flawless performance; you achieve "beat up" status by sustaining 100+ perfect "moves." Once I'd tasted a little Beat Up success, there was no going back.
I suddenly started to improve rapidly. From stumbling my way through Level 1 songs, I found myself pounding madly along, perfect after perfect, with Thunderbirds Are Now! I learned to identify particularly challenging songs and request them, with the smiley-faced IM-speak encouragement from other dancers. Then, in one session, I won by a significant margin - and the host banned me from the room.
I had reached the inner ring.
I knew I had to go to the next level. I had to break out the credit card.
