The emergent movement, explained in DDR terms.

Since I had first heard about it, the emergent movement has been somewhat confusing to me. The most common explanation of what it is… is this, ” a conversation concerned with the deconstruction and reconstruction of protestant Christianity.”

Uh, what? The deconstruction and reconstruction? I’m so confused.

So I read the books (well, am reading), looked at writings of the largest proponents, tried to get a handle on what this all means. I think I’m starting to, and one of the best ways to learn something is to have to teach it, sooo… here we go!

We’re gonna focus on the terms “deconstruction and reconstruction.” And we’re gonna try and apply it to something that is abit more abstract that theology or doctrine. We’re going to use Dance Dance Revolution, or simply “DDR.” If this is a new phrase to you, read this post first.

A week or so ago, still Internet-less at the crib, I was DDRing up a storm. It was amazing. I was like a machine. Something was very apparent though, that I had known for some time. You see, in the easy and moderate difficulty DDR songs, it does not really matter which arrows you press with which feet… that is to say, if the arrow pattern is Left, Down, Left, Down, its very easy to press all of those with your left foot. Let’s make this visual.

Assuming a bit of experience, most DDR players can easily hit all those with one foot, and its fine.

This approach, broadly defined as a way of ddr’ing that makes no big issue of which foot you use to press which arrow, works perfectly through 90% of the DDR songs. As you approach the high-end, the model breaks down. You see, at the hardest levels of DDR songs, you don’t have a chance to press two arrows in a row with the same foot, as the song is simply too fast to allow your body to move that fast. Again, lets do this visually. Imagine attempting to press all of these arrows in 6 to 10 seconds with one foot:

(for the musically inclined, the red arrows are quarter note beats, the blue are eigth notes, and the purple are sixteenth notes. I think.)

How does this relate to the emergent movement? The motivation behind this deconstruction and reconstruction comes from the realization that something doesn’t line up, something isn’t right. Either your way of doing life isn’t relevant to others (much as randomly selecting which foot presses arrows won’t stack up in that second diagram), or you just know something is… not working.

So where do we go from here? That’s where the deconstruction comes in. I refused to not make a serious effort to do the hardest DDR songs, but I didn’t know how to do them from my own method of dancing. So I went back to the beginning. I played some of the simplest songs, trying to understand what the creators of DDR intended. And I discovered something: they go out of their way to teach you to press each consecutive arrow with the next foot. Often, its written into the patterns of arrows that you can always alternate your feet. The problem is that this requires thought and planning, which isn’t necessary because the songs are so easy, so most people just take the simplest route and do it as they see fit.

So I worked on easier songs, that typically I wouldn’t bother with. This is what the deconstruction was: I looked at where I had learned bad habits, and tried to unlearn them in light of what I knew to be true in harder songs. One of these bad habits is that when you DDR, you never let your left foot press the right arrow, or your right foot press the left arrow. Since the left foot is so much closer to the left arrow, obviously you want to press it with that foot. It’s a shame that there is no real basis for this, and in the hard songs, you aren’t allowed to have such arbitrary rules.

So that brings us to reconstruction. Taking this new approach, it became clear that turning around backwards, or turning all the way to one side or the other was how the songs were intended to be done. So I slowly ramped the difficulty back up, with an “ethic” of DDR that was expanded to do the hardest songs.

An interesting side effect, which strikes at the heart of the emergent movement, was that in doing this, I could actually dance instead of breaking my back trying to hit all these arrows that my brain couldn’t keep up with. That is to say, I could actually do the purpose of the game, which was to dance, instead of trying to hit arrows. This is of course a work in progress, because, as they say… “one man’s dancing is another man’s randomly-flailing-around-pressing-arrows.”

Today’s funny link is good ole fashion aliens-abducting-cows fun: www.cowabduction.com