Merk vs. IndyDDR: Waiting for a Merk-acle

[Ho]

I played for about an hour tonight. I also setup my Fitbit just prior to playing and got somewhere between 6,500-7,000 steps in from the play session.

I played Silent Hill 3rd Christmas and got down to 11 greats for a score of 553.

I played one set of Hyper Offbeat and had over 100 greats twice and like 60 the last time with some random NCs here and there on each. I was dialed in (or dialed out) better when I played it a few weeks ago.

I also played some regular Silent Hill to see if I could improve on my 14. I couldn't. I think 18 was the best I could do tonight. I had like 60 the first time I played it after playing Offbeat. I guess it took me a bit to readjust.

Merk, you may want to check your score for Silent Hill 3rd. The double chart only has 48 freezes while the single has 50 as you indicated. I calculate your score at 541. You may have looked at and/or entered your score into the wrong one on Stay On Sync. I went ahead and updated the OP with 541 for you and also did the math for your Hyper Offbeat score.

[Merk]

Yeah I must have fucked up! I *thought* I got all the freezes on Silent Hill when I played it but when I went to enter my score I saw that there were 50 freezes and told myself, "Huh, I must've missed a freeze or two..." thank you for updating the OP with the correct score!

How the heck did you get 7,000 steps in an hour? My fat ass takes about 90 minutes at least to get that much. I don't move my wrist a whole lot when playing so I feel like that may have something to do with it.

[Ho]

I looked at my logs to verify. It looks like I got about 6,000 steps in 70 min. There were a couple breaks and a couple games of DrumMania in that time, so there's that.

I don't think you really have to move your wrist much, if at all, for the Fitbit to pick up steps. I've tried walking around being careful to not move my wrist and it seems to pick up steps just fine. However, I've found that certain ways of petting a cat can also count as steps.

For a comparison, I only logged 5,745 steps in 2.5 hours of Fantasia: Music Evolved, which is pretty much all upper body movement. I was playing pretty hard, so I think it should have definitely counted as steps--or at least some kind of physical activity. I can accept that it would probably be about half of DDR since I'm not having to carry my whole weight around to play.

[Ho]

I did a little experimentation with the Fitbit this weekend.

I played a song...I don't recall which one now, but I think it was a level 8. The results screen indicated there were somewhere around 300+ steps. The Fitbit logged a little over 200...maybe 210-220. I then played the same song again with the Fitbit attached to a belt loop on my pants. It logged approximately the same number of steps. As you probably know, I tend to move my arms around a fair bit while I'm playing--especially doubles. But with those results, I don't think arm/wrist movement much of an impact on the Fitbit step count.

I played many songs in the 8 foot range and they all pretty much netted me a little over 200 steps regardless of the step count the game gave. Going up in level didn't seem to register any more steps. It was only going down to around 6 or 7 that I started to see the step count fall a little bit.

I also played some DrumMania songs in the 50s and some jubeat 8s. They also registered around 200 steps per song. Of course those games are all arm movement (well, I guess DM has the kick pedal...that might be an interesting experiment sometime). And, DrumMania in particular has A LOT OF HITS. I don't think it would be unusual for a song in the 50s to have 500-1000 hits. Even only half of them counted (one arm), I'm sure you'd have a lot more than DDR.

So my theory is that the Fitbit is only capable (either hardware limitation or by design) of counting around 3 steps per second. That would be 270 steps in 90 seconds which is roughly Bemani song length. Most step charts aren't even and the beginning and end often don't have many or any steps, so you're not stepping the entire 90 seconds. And then quick 8ths and especially 16ths probably happen faster than 3 per seconds, so some steps will get missed or thrown away. Within those parmenters, the 200-220 steps per song results that I was getting seem to make sense.

I did the math. If you play with minimal breaks, you can expect about 6000-7000 Fitbit steps per hour for playing DDR songs with a difficulty of 7+ (on Extreme...I barely understand the new ratings system).

[Ho]

Merk,

New week. New year. New song...pick one!

[Merk]

Hmmmmm.....

Have we done Living In America yet? Let's do that. Welcome to Obama's America.

I'm going to focus the first few days of this week on getting scores for some of the other songs I missed like Twilight Zone, My Sweet Darlin', etc.

[Ho]

Cool. Got it.

What did you think of my Fitbit experiments/conclusions?

It looks like I'm just about to catch you on the 7-day leaderboard. Should we start a work week hustle challenge?

[Merk]

Ahhh, I was going to comment on your observations but I keep getting pulled away with work so I only have time to make little bullshit posts about mall shootings and footbaw.

I'm not really sure how the 7-day leaderboard works, does it just add up your last 7 days? I haven't done any sort of real activity since New Year's eve so my step count over the last 7 days is about to plummet. I would like to do the work week hustle! Challenge meeeeee

[Ho]

I sent you an invite.

LET'S DO THIS!

[Merk]

So yeah all those steps I got yesterday? Those were definitely Beet steps -- whoops! I guess one can get 6000 steps in about 45 minutes just by playing Beatmania, who knew?

Anyway, I am playing some racquetball tonight so I may or may not end up with a bunch of steps.

[Ho]

I saw you jump up in our challenge, so I figured you probably played DDR. But it was beet, huh? I don't find beatmania to be particularly physically demanding (effort-wise, not skill-wise). I wouldn't really complain about DrumMania or even pop'n for physical effort, but beet seems kind of cheap. Well, at least you were honest about it.

I think that helps prove out some of my earlier theories though. If I math out 6000 steps in 45 minutes, that comes to about 2.2 steps per second. That comes in under my 3 per second maximum that I had figured before. There were probably some breaks in there to navigate menus and whatnot, too. But I'm sure that 45 minutes of beet is much more than 6000 hand movements otherwise.

I may give the song of the week a try tonight. We'll see how my evening goes. My day so far has been kind of strange. I didn't get to the office until 2pm because I was waiting at home for a repair person.

[Merk]

Yeah, in all honesty I forgot to take the Fitbit off and didn't notice it was on until it started vibrating to tell me I had reached my goal. Beet is definitely not exercise and I'll be sure to take my Fitbit off in the future when I play since it is basically cheating. Hell, I probably spend more physical effort in getting pissed off and frustrated at the game than I do actually playing it... Yesterday was not a good Beet day

[Ho]

Aww. I'm sorry you weren't playing well. But if it's any consolation, I did enjoy your description.

I got a bunch of steps this morning clearing my driveway. Thanks, winter!

[Merk]

Welp about an hour of cut-throat (1v1v1) Racquetball gets you about 6,000 steps!

Gonna play some Didder tonight and probably tomorrow night, gotta get more steps! My CCNP study book is going to be delivered to my place tonight so I guess today marks my return to studying for more stupid Cisco bullshit. There's not enough time in the day to do all the things I wanna do like DDR, Beet, and studying, you know?

[Ho]

I have also found the allotted 28 hours to be inadequate.

If my theory is correct (about 3 steps per second), then the maximum number of steps you could earn in an hour is 10,800. So 6,000 seems pretty reasonable as I assume that you were not moving the entire time. And if you were...DAMN!

Out of curiosity, how many minutes out of that hour did the Fitbit say you were very active? When I played DDR for about 1:45 on Sunday, it said that I had 47 very active minutes. That seems reasonable for time between games and songs, getting drinks, and the fact that I know I did some other things during that time.

At any rate, I did play last night. Living In America seems hard for some reason. Maybe it was just me. I almost failed it the first time I played and then actually did fail it the second time. Wow.

I played it a few more times and started to get a feel for it, but it just seems really fast. Maybe it's just unfamiliarity. I don't think I had ever played it before. It's not really a song that I think about. In the end, I got down to 75 greats and some goods and misses for a DP of 653. That should be pretty easily beatable by either of us.