if you get worse at a video game with practice, but the game mechanics are only a mechanism for it to have something to hypnotize you into being worse at, and you want to be hypnotized and hypnotizable, are you actually getting worse at it?

also I am deeply amused to recognize that this is the exact thing a request for which a request for playtesters was recently issued.

anyway, it turns out I was wrong, I have no trouble following vocal hypnosis audio at all, it’s visualization that I suck at. fortunately, not being able to visualize a staircase doesn’t seem to have interfered with the induction much. everything that made me think I’m bad at being hypnotized was based on extensive use of visualization. I’m realizing that the experience of visualization for me is like manually constructing a shape out of geometric primitives like some kind of vector-art set of Tinkertoys (K’Nex to you young’uns out there) and I absolutely cannot do that “at speed”. sure, I can design a patch for a multithreaded cache consistency algorithm faster than I can identify the words to describe it, but I cannot think about a shape with more than four sides without having to actively stop to build it as a relationship between simpler geometric objects, which requires effort to keep any sense of the positional relationship maintained in my mind. okay, clearly I am making about as much sense as might be expected after the fractionation and that is pretty much the point so I guess what I’m saying is that, yeah, I’m pretty hypnotizable as it turns out.

it turns out I am able to take a suggestion to be unable to properly apply the various multi-step arithmetic relations I rely on for mental math, but not yet able to forget the basic value of various numerals. I’m certain that with enough practice I can get even worse at this game