I was watching a twitch streamer play the game pogostuck (A game similar in frustration and difficulty to Getting over it with Bennett Foddy — Don’t Fall!).
They were also reading chat at the same time (usually out loud, as well). Multitasking.
Lots of sources (here’s one) say that true multitasking is impossible. Rather, it’s very fast switching, where there is a degradation of performance.
Knowing this, I naturally made it my mission to trip the streamer up with seemingly benign messages.
I was sharing some actual information about another streamer who beat another game, but a made a typo something like:
I remember a streamer beat the game a game …
And I noticed how much more the streamer struggled to read this compared to previous, accidental typos (missing spaces, extra spaces, etc.). He spent a good 5 seconds on this message, and during the process, he fell really far. 😈
So I decided to do some testing. Inserting words, swapping them around, and whatnot, to see what tripped him up the most. Most typos didn’t affect him.
There was one typo that tripped him again, where I said something like:
If it wasn’t for a for
So it seems to be repetition? But I couldn’t always replicate this with other forms of repetition.
Later on, I copied the two guards riddle, with an alteration:
One of the guards always lies and the other always lies as wekk. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other
Sadly, I didn’t cut the part about “don’t know which is truth teller or liar” out.
The streamer spent a good 5 minutes interpreting this puzzle, and eventually interpreting it as the original puzzle. Then, he was trying to solve a riddle, game, and read chat all at once.
He was stuck on the bottom until he gave up on the riddle (I revealed that I meant what I said when I said both guards lie). 😈
Anyway, that was a bit off topic but still relevant.
I’m wondering if any studies have been done on this? I know studies have been done on human’s ability to read words with the letters partially scrambled, but what about typos?
How can I improve my distraction game (with plausible deniability of course)?
You diabolical diablolic person. You could also use loan words which are rarely used but still known by the average person and spell them wrong, this would give you lots of schadnefreudne
schadnefreudne
This one is good, but I read right through it — although reading out loud would probably make this more difficult, it really depends on the streamers familiarity with the words. Possibly they might be tripped up, and possibly they would struggle.
This does give me an idea to use words which are hard to pronounce, like gif (which is actually pretty easy, just use the G in GiGantic). And then force them to pronounce them, or argue about pronunciation.
Well, I can tell you one thing. I can’t multitask if my life depended on it. OK, I can, but 2 things at max, any more and I start getting nervous and make mistakes.
Women though… oh boy, I’ve seen them cook, talk on the phone and watch a soap opera all at the same time… have no idea how some of them do it, I’d just glitch and reboot.
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Sure. You can make arbitrarily complex mistakes. From just using the wrong preposition to inserting completely illegible dependent clauses in the wrong order that also have nothing to do with what you’re trying to say.
You might want to ask an english teacher for details. I suppose they deal with that on a daily basis.
As a non-native English speaker, yes, if the typo happens to turn the right word into a correctly-spelled wrong but otherwise relevant word. For example, there was an old running joke back in the day (before I was born) where people would misspell the Beatles song “Hey Jude” with “Hey Dude”. Even missing a comma can have this effect.
