welcome to the hyperfixation station

and like what I believe is a major source of the problem is that many people stop reading instructions as soon as they think they know what's expected of them. and I'm not actually sure a video would help very much!

would someone in the 45% "oh we're making a bell curve okay I can skip the short paragraph directly above the poll then that surely won't contain any relevant information" demographic watch an entire video just so they know what format I expect for a survey question, or would they watch enough of the video to get to the point where they think they know what's expected of them and then fill out the survey incorrectly?

how do I convey how extremely important it is to actually read and follow the instructions without coming across as condescending or scaring people away with how many paragraphs they have to read?

I want to eventually make a survey where people tell me directly in an open answer question what games they think the mainline super mario series consists of. to get useful data out of that, I need the answers to be well formatted.

specifically, I need it to be obvious and unignorable that:

I expect the items of the list to be separated by line breaks, not commas (some video game titles have commas in them so I can't automate the process of turning their list into data if they use commas)

the participant should not write anything in their response that is not part of their list

neither of these are things that are impossible to fix if someone doesn't follow the instructions, but they can't be fixed automatically. I'd need to manually clean up the responses or pay someone else to do it or (worst option!) cross my fingers and hope google gemini isn't hallucinating if I give it my data to clean up.

Art Fight 2026's theme reveal stream will start in ONE HOUR! That is 10:00 AM EDT / 2:00 PM UTC specifically. The stream will last for roughly six hours, and the theme will be revealed at 4:00 PM EDT / 8:00 PM UTC.