The Game

The Game is a mind game in which the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The Game. Depending on the variation, it is held that the whole world, or all those who are aware of the game, are playing it at all times. Tactics have been developed to increase the number of people who are aware of The Game, and thereby increase the number of losses. Origin The origins of The Game are uncertain. The most common hypothesis as is that The Game derives from another mental game, Finchley Central. While the original version of Finchley Central involves taking turns to name stations, in 1976 some members of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society (CUSFS) developed a variant where the first person to think of the titular station loses. The game in this form demonstrates ironic processing, in which attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts make those thoughts more common or persistent than they would be at random. How this became simplified into The Game is unknown; one hypothesis is that once it spread outside the Greater London area, among people who are less familiar with London stations, it morphed into its self-referential form. The creators of "LoseTheGame.net", a website which aims to catalogue information relating to the phenomenon, have received messages from multiple former members of the CUSFS commenting on the similarity between the Finchley Central variant and the modern Game. The first known reference to The Game is a blog post from 2002 – the author states that they "found out about it online about 6 months ago". The Game is most commonly spread through the internet, such as via Facebook or Twitter, or by word of mouth.