Audition, A Game About Dancing: A Nonviolent MMORPG

There are dozens, if not hundreds of massively multiplayer online RPGs, or MMORPGs, and it can be a challenge to find any that don't involve guns, swords and sex. Even Second Life is full of creeps.

Audition, on the other hand, is an MMORPG that focuses on dance. Sound lame? I thought so at first. I soon found out how wrong I was.

Comparisons to Dance Dance Revolution are obvious, but Audition actually plays more like an old Playstation title called Bust A Groove.

Audition uses the keyboard's direction keys and the spacebar: Before the end of the music measure, you must enter a sequence of directional keys and, on the first beat of the next measure, you hit the spacebar. Each measure is rated on how close the spacebar is hit compared to the first beat of the measure, from "Miss" to "Perfect." Perfects are quite difficult to obtain. Getting good ratings is easy at first, with only four or five direction keys, but the action gets frantic on the faster songs and higher challenge levels. Up to six people can play against each other.

So where does the roleplaying come in? Winning games gives you experience points, and after you've reached a certain amount you gain a level. After Level 5, players must complete "license" songs to advance a level. These license trials cost some of the game's currency, called Den.

Unlike many commercial MMORPGs, Audition is not pay-to-play; Den is also awarded when the player wins games, and this often covers license games and the obligatory character modifications like clothing and hairstyle. Players can still buy Den with actual money, to save time and effort, but it is never even close to necessary.

There are lots of game modes, including solo practices, Freestyle mode, which lets players use their own key combos, team battles, boys versus girls, and a couple's game that pits up to three male-female couples against each other. Each game mode also has an eight-key version that uses the diagonal keys on the number pad, adding a great deal of challenge to the game.