Dancing games

I remember the days when the "dance mats" for Sony PlayStation were immensely popular...  Anyone who was anyone owned one (I didn't) and schools and youth clubs would hold "dance mat competitions" for all the local kidz to compete it...  Personally, I never felt it counted as real dancing at all - I still maintain that using a PlayStation dance mat made you look like someone trying to play Hopscotch in a shower cubicle!

However, with the advent of "motion sensor based" gaming - firstly with the Nintendo Wii, and now, more recently, with Kinect for XBox - the idea of fusing video games and dancing is once again enjoying a certain amount of popularity...

These new games seem to provide more actual dancing than the old dance mats used to, and yet, I still struggle to see their worth...

Y'see, I thought that dancing was mainly a social activity...  (If we ignore, for a minute, professional dancers dancing in competitions, and so on...)  I don't really see much point in boogieing down to some Tina Turner when I'm on my own, standing in front of the television!  Yes, it's true that the current adverts on TV for these "dance game" products show the games being used socially, at house parties and so on, but always in a situation where one or two people are dancing, while the other party guests crowd 'round like spectators at an illegal cage fight somewhere in Thailand...  It just doesn't strike me as a particularly enjoyable party activity!

I think, at the end of the day, whether you do it alone, or with friends, you are still dancing around your own living room, staring at the TV screen - and, quite frankly, you probably look a bit of a plonker!