Rhythm Games Glossary

The rhythm game community, as with pretty much every other long-standing videogame community out there, is full of specific jargon that is, at first, completely incomprehensible for outsiders. Because these communities also sometimes lie dormant or outside conventional communication channels, such terminology may not have an obvious definition at first. Here's whatever I managed to compile from several places - forums both dead and alive, direct questions to people and so forth. It's mainly here so I can keep it all in one place and not having to navigate through half a dozen inactive websites in order to find it. An eternal work in progress.

• BPM: Beats Per Minute. Arbitrary? value that defines input rhythm. Not necessarily static within a song.
• This category would make a bit more sense if there was more than one other section in this article…

Stepmania is a “dance machine” framework that allows playing any song that has been mapped to the appropriate input, either made by the community or ported from other games of the same category, e.g. DDR, Pump it Up…¹⁾

• Arrow: A single note input. Also [single] note, tap, hit, step… It can be mapped to any of the available inputs (usually four, also five or six, depending on gamemode) and is associated to a certain temporal position of the song, illustrated by arrows on a column moving towards an indicator of sorts, the goal of the game is to press it as accurately as possible with regards to its correct time, i.e. hitting the associated key as soon as the arrow reaches its indicator. ²⁾The default Stepmania notes are 4 (Up, Down, Left, Right) and as such they're divided and displayed in-game as four separate “columns”.
• Chord: ≥2 arrows in the same time period, also double, triple, quadruple… double is usually called jump (as in on a dancemat, one would have to jump to hit two buttons at once), and triple is called hand (one would have to drop to the floor and hit the third button with a hand in order to do this on a dancemat).
• Chord cohesion: Describes the particular way in which Stepmania handles chords, which has the consequence of not taking into account early taps as long as the last note of a chord is successfully input³⁾.
• Hold: Technically a general term. As a noun, it refers to the note that has is to be pressed and held within its specified timeframe. The timing of a hold is not as carefully calculated as that of a regular note, and in fact allows letting go of the key in question for up to 250ms.
• Mine: Similar to a note, but they're meant to be purposefully avoided. Hitting it usually implies a hefty penalty. Outside songs from commercial rhythm games, it appears they're mostly used aesthetically rather than to trick the player as they were originally made.
• Step (v.): To create a stepfile for a particular song, thereby making the song playable in Stepmania.

A pattern is defined as a sequence of notes with a particular rhythmic characteristic. The following are names given to patterns displaying these characteristics in question.

• Stream: A pattern composed of notes running at the same (or similar) speed, usually not within the same column. Also seen streamlet, usually a fast stream below sixteen notes.
• Jumpstream: A stream featuring jumps (i.e. 2-chord notes).
• Handstream: A stream featuring hands (i.e. 3-chord notes).
• Holdstream: A stream featuring holds.
• Stepjump: Successive alternation between jumps and steps.
• Trill: Rapid alternation between two buttons. It can also be one-handed.
• Jumptrill: Trill made out of jumps.
• Jack: Fast repetition of the same button. Can be hidden within a larger stream, intertwined with other notes.
• Jackspeed: Refers to a high-speed jack pattern.
• Minijack: A short jack. A two-note jack is called a double tap in some places.
• Chordjack: A jack involving fast repetition of chords, usually hands.
• Staircase: Pattern that goes from one of the end-columns to the other, one adjacent column at a time. It can then bounce back to the column it started with, in the opposite direction (a spiral staircase) or repeat the original column in direction and destination (a repeating staircase).
• Technical: Adjective used to describe patterns of any sort that are at first glance unfriendly or non-intuitive. Generally involves irregular jump patterns, unwieldy note spacing, or a sudden high note density at a fast BPM.