the.com/whackamole
a rigged morality play where punishing problems only teaches them to pop up faster.
means A situation where solving one problem only causes others to appear, so your efforts never actually reduce the total trouble.
from Straight from the arcade game Whac-A-Mole, introduced in the mid-1970s, in which players bash plastic moles back into their holes with a padded mallet only to have more spring up elsewhere. The name stitches together "whack" (a hard blow, an old imitative word for a smacking sound) and "mole" (the burrowing animal, from Middle English). The brand spelling drops the 'k' in "whac," but the doubled-up "whackamole" is how the metaphor migrated into everyday speech for any endless, futile game of suppression.
- origin
- Invented in Japan in 1975 as Mogura Taiji
- unwinnable
- Speed always outpaces you; the game profits from failure
- idiom
- Now means fixing one thing breaks another
- world record
- Fastest player bonks moles faster than a heartbeat
- animal cousins
- Versions swap moles for crocodiles, zombies, even sharks
carnival whack-a-mole — arcade game at fairs and carnivals worldwide since the 1970s where players hit animatronic moles with mallets
digital whack-a-mole — mobile game app with billions of downloads, especially popular versions on ios and android since 2010s