'It's an addiction and I have to feed it. The first time I played, I was hooked," admits 19-year-old gamer Winson Ting. On reading that, you may be picturing the speaker as pallid and unhealthy, with poor hygiene and knotted muscles from too many days and nights spent hunched over his keyboard or gamepad. You probably won't be imagining Ting as a skilled athlete who trains regularly, wins tournaments and entertains crowds with a blend of break dancing and hip-hop moves. But that's exactly what he is, thanks to Konami's game Dance Dance Revolution and the European version, Dancing Stage. What has become a gaming phenomenon in Japan is now taking over arcades and homes in the UK, bringing dance to the people.

The premise of Dancing Stage is simple. The player stands on a metal or plastic platform with four sensors: up, down, left and right, and mimics scrolling arrows that appear on the screen with their feet in time with the music. Although this "Simon Says" aspect of games like Dancing Stage have been a feature of many western toys for years, it was Sony's PaRappa the Rapper in 1997, a copycat button-pushing game, which kick-started the rhythm-action genre in Japan.

Over the past five years, Konami has released numerous music-oriented games that work by using uniquely styled peripherals such as guitars and drums. Sega and others have also followed suit with, among others, games based around maracas and tambourines. The games have subsequently come to be collectively known as Bemani games, named after the first of Konami's titles, BeatMania, which used keyboard buttons and a small turntable to create a DJ-style simulation. Konami's games have also lead to numerous spins-offs such as Britney's Dance Beat, and Sega's Space Channel 5, making rhythm-action games one of the most flourishing genres around.

One of the beauties of Bemani games is that they're accessible to anyone regardless of age, gender or experience, because they tap into our musicality rather than our actual ability to play the instruments or create unique dances for real. However, for the experienced dancer like Ting, it's serious business. "It's more than just copying the arrow sequence on the screen," claims Ting, who himself adopts the freestyler mode of play where the object is to be as much of a crowd-pleasing exhibitionist as possible. "You've got music to move your body to and, being a freestyler, you want to impress the crowd. So, in order to do that, you can do a handstand or a bar freeze. It's a lot more than just pressing buttons when they get to the top of the screen."

In fact, Dancing Stage has created a whole dictionary, not only of types of dancer nicknames (such as the Gorilla, Bouncer and Mentalist), but also of moves from the basic to the acrobatic, with names like Dragon's Perch, Butt Out, Hand Jump and the 360 Degree Disaster. According to Dancegames.com, to execute a Hand Jump you need to "create a loop by grabbing left foot with the right hand, then jump up using right foot, pass it through the loop, and on target panel." Or how about the Matrix Walk, where the dancer jumps up and briefly runs across the screen of the machine and then jumps back down.

But for every diehard dancer there are hundreds of casual users. Mike Roberts, 25, from Chelmsford has been a fan of Bemani games for the past couple of years. Although he can shake, step and strut in public, he can also identify with those who are nervous about getting their rhythm-action groove on for the first time. "It's a vicious circle for a beginner: you think you'll look silly when you practice and you can't stop looking silly unless you practice," he says. "It's all about getting over self-consciousness. You don't really have to know how to dance or how to play the maracas to play the game, but by the time you get good at it, the chances are that you'll be better on a real dance floor and if someone handed you a real pair of maracas at a party, you could bring the house down with an impression of Cuban Pete!"

Alongside joysticks and gamepads, most games retailers now stock plastic and metal dance mats for home use. Despite the £125 price tag, the metal dance mats have been flying off the shelves, proving that players are serious enough about their dancing to want to recreate the arcade feel at home.

In its homeland, rhythm-action games are suffering from market saturation, and while Japan searches for the next big gaming thing, it's in the UK and not the US that rhythm-action has found a flourishing fan base.

With Kylie and Elvis v JXL heading up the song list for the latest version of Dancing Stage, in the form of Dancing Stage: Megamix for the PlayStation 2, rhythm-action has the power to capture the hearts, minds, hands and feet of gamers. And in the UK, at least, the beat still goes on.