Playing Just Dance Through YouTube Is A Great Way To Make New Friends

By Wallace Truesdale | September 15, 2025 | 11:30am

Video Games Features Just Dance

Playing Just Dance Through YouTube Is A Great Way To Make New Friends

Like many good things, Just Dance’s continued presence in my life started as a comedic bit—one born from a conversation in my college freshman dorm in 2019 that, after a few twists and turns, got carried away into hours of flailing limbs and unstoppable laughter. Then, Just Dance briefly reappeared in my life while I was trying to find new exercises during the 2020 lockdown and remembered how sweaty the game could leave me after a few songs. Post-lockdown, Just Dance would rear its head again as boredom developed inside a computer lab one night transformed into a chorus of voices choosing the next song we’d all dance to. Eventually, I realized Just Dance had more staying power than I first thought when it took up the entire evening at a house party during my first year out of college—and that power was helping build meaningful connections.

Somehow, without intention or planning, Just Dance had become one of the best ways of making friends during my late teens and early twenties. I would’ve laughed in someone’s face had they told me this when I graduated high school in 2018. Just Dance hadn’t been relevant in my life—past being an interesting look into what Ubisoft considered the hot songs of yesteryear—since my family gave our Nintendo Wii away. I never felt a strong desire to buy the Switch editions of Just Dance because the complete tracklists weren’t particularly enticing. And despite the super-vibrant, hip-shaking game creating some fun evenings for my family, we had collectively begun to sour on it due to how finicky we perceived the scoring system to be. In 2018, the game had comfortably found its place on my mental shelf of Fun Things That Can Now Be Laid To Rest.

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But years of engaging in impromptu group choreography is forcing me to concede that Just Dance may be more helpful than ever in making friends. In case you’ve never played the game or could use a refresher, Just Dance has players match the choreography of in-game dancers along to the beats and lyrics of popular songs. While the game is most often played with movement-sensing controls like Wii Remotes, Switch Joy-Cons, or VR controllers, in actuality the only thing you need to participate is your body and an ability to follow directions. With that in mind, playing Just Dance actually has a fairly low-barrier to entry when you remember that people love making playthroughs of anything on YouTube, including dance games. From there, looking up “Hot n Cold,” “Jump On It,” “Let’s Groove,” or “Rasputin” and shaking some ass with nearby folks is just a matter of knowledge and willingness.

If you’re wondering why do this rather than, you know, just turn on any given playlist and turn up the speakers, I’d say don’t underestimate the relief in following an instructor. There’s a reason that no matter how a dance floor starts, it gains numbers when songs with instructions like the “Cha Cha Slide” flood ears. It helps that they’re catchy and increasingly nostalgic, but what sells them is that everyone is told what to do. Instructional songs, and Just Dance fundamentally, remove the most awkward part of dancing (and sometimes, conversation): coming up with your own moves. People can recommend any number of old reliables like the simple two-step, or even just jumping and down if it fits the song, but those recommendations don’t necessarily address the core discomfort in being perceived while dancing. With Just Dance, you’re dancing, but you’re equally playing a game.

And generally speaking, games come with some level of expectation that failure is possible, whereas being bad at dancing—even if it shouldn’t be that deep—brings failure into a social place where its negativity is heightened. Plus, an added benefit of playing through a YouTube recording rather than the actual game is that because players are free from the burden of a score, people tend to be more focused on having fun following the game’s faceless instructors rather than being aware of a final judgment. In other words, Just Dance on YouTube forms a space that borrows the game’s aesthetics but ultimately drops the part that determines winners and losers, making it an experience that’s actually just dancing and nothing else.

Even outside of the unique changes this method of playing Just Dance creates, fundamental elements of the game naturally lend it to being a good icebreaker. Anyone who has seen a room light up when the right song comes on can attest to music’s ability to loosen people up not just physically, but verbally. Mouths that were repeating song lyrics will quickly shift to sharing where they first heard the song, or making jokes and observations about the song itself, or any number of things that can act as the launchpad for a longer conversation.

I’d argue this is an extra effective strategy in today’s world where more and more people are struggling to start conversations. This could be (and has been) attributed to any number of things, including but not limited to: the social media-born tendency to record everything that frequently ends in someone’s life being exploded; a necessary lockdown at the start of a pandemic that significantly affected young people’s social skills; the deeply misogynistic manosphere leaking out of the Internet and becoming everyone’s problems; and the current amount of time that work (and preparing for work) takes up that requires significant intention if you want any chance of developing adult friendships. Overall, making friends isn’t easy under ideal circumstances, so it’s not shocking that it hasn’t gotten any easier when people are struggling.

Just Dance isn’t a perfect band-aid for this bonding-averse status quo. It won’t solve the aforementioned systemic issues. On some level, it requires creating the context for people to all meet in one area to begin and that alone can be a hurdle. The meet-up vibes might be more chill and leaning towards conversations on the couch, not changing living rooms into Zumba studios. People may not be able to move their bodies very rigorously and could feel excluded if the gathering doesn’t have alternate group activities. And the amount of songs Just Dance offers isn’t infinite or suits everyone’s tastes, so starting a round might lead to more performance for others than group engagement.

But even with all that, I still must recommend folks see what happens when they look up Just Dance on YouTube, or boot up a copy they own, and ask some strangers if they want to play. Because when it works, it works. Because I can say from experience that moving in the same rhythm of another, working towards the same goal of hitting the beats, sharing the same laugh when someone slides right instead of left, and finally collapsing in unison when the song comes to an end might just lead to a new friend.

Wallace Truesdale is a journalist and critic who loves games and much of what they come into contact with. He’s written for Unwinnable, Stop Caring, PopMatters, and more. You can usually find him blogging at his site Exalclaw, hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch, or devouring some cookies.