Whack-a-Mole

Bop the moles as they pop up before the timer runs out. Faster and faster — how high can you score?

The arcade cabinet came from Japan in 1975, where Kazuo Yamada's Mogura Taiji put mechanical moles on solenoids under a padded mallet. The phrase escaped the arcade entirely and is now standard engineering vocabulary for a class of bug that reappears elsewhere each time you fix it.

As a test it measures something specific: not raw reaction speed but the cost of switching attention between locations. Targets appearing in unpredictable positions force a visual search on every prompt, which is why scores improve markedly when players stop tracking individual holes and let peripheral vision do the detection.