The problem with playing in arcades

I'm sure all of you can relate. Except for people stealing the camera, I've experienced all of those.

Heck, not even fighting games are immune to this. What are some of these crazy experiences that happened to you for playing DDR, ITG or PIU in public?

I have a lot. I'll post some more stories soon. For now, here's one:

A part of the floor in the arcade needed repairs. There are barriers around to prevent people from crossing. Unfortunately, the barriers are tied around the bars of a DDR machine. So in order for people to get around the arcade, people are forced to go between the DDR machine and the pads. And yes, I played a few games without taking that into consideration. It got frustrating as time passes. The only good thing about it is that some people are willing to wait for me to finish a song, but of course not all of them.

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I remember several years back being haunted by the air hockey table because people would always slam the puck as hard as possible and it would land next to the DDR machine without fail. Sometimes it would hit me while playing, sometimes it'd roll in front of the pads. It was a constant annoyance and I feel like it's given me a negative association with air hockey forever now.

Unattended children are also annoying. Usually nowadays they show some restraint, but I do remember losing an extra stage once to a child jumping on the pad while I was playing.

And to end on a more positive note, once I was playing DDR while one of the Round1 staff was doing maintenance on the Pump It Up machine. Suddenly in the middle of playing, the whole DDR cab turns off. Oops! Turns out he unplugged more than Pump It Up... He apologized and gave us like 10 free credits on the DDR machine after it rebooted.

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This isn't a dance game, but one time while I was playing Chuni some teens came up to me and started trying to distract me. One of them even started putting their hand on the slider. I just kept playing, and eventually they left me alone. After I mentioned this in the local Discord server, I was informed those teens had already been banned from the arcade for that kind of behaviour and possibly even wanted by the RCMP for being a public nuisance, which was crazy to hear.

I cleared that with an S still by the way. They barely impacted my play LMAO.

Apart from that experience I myself had, there are many tales of children on the Pump pads at my local arcades. Ever since CHQ got a streaming setup there, a number of them have been caught on camera, too—shoutout to this one in particular.

It's insane the amount of times I've seen children run over to Pump pads to jump up and down/stomp super hard while the machine is running it's attract or chilling on the main menu.

Not a BEMANI or step story but once after visiting the movie theater me and the bro wanted to quickly grab our daily login stamps for maimai, during our second song some kid probably around like 7 or 8 (guessing based off where his voice was coming from + pitch) decided to watch and questioned me over EVERYTHING that happened during the MV. Craziest part is this was at like 9:20 PM and we couldn't see him or his parent/guardian once the song ended. Quite a nothing burger but annoyed the hell outta me.