Talk:The Game (mind game)/Archive

The VfD discussion is now archived at Talk:The Game (game)/VfD Archive.

Lesser-known variations

The purpous of the article is to document the most wide-spread rule variations. Howevever, many players have wanted to add serious or humorous rule variations that very few people seem to know. Rspeer has done a great job of keeping these off the main page to keep the article as main-stream as possible. Instead of adding such rules to the main page, I encourage you to add them to this section for posterity. If you play any of the following variations, feel free to add your name after the variation. Bkkbrad 16:36, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• If you unpremeditatedly lose The Game while having an orgasm, The Game is officially broken.
• One branch, at least, involves the promise of a "patch" given (in the afterlife) to those who are in the winning state at the end.
• You may temporarily win the game if you say 'moo' or 'omo' or 'oom' before realizing that you are playing the game.
• (UK only) Should the current prime minister declare that he or she has lost the game, all other players win the game and scores are reset. In many variations, this is the only way of winning.
• Although this isn't a strategy of The Game per se, the phrase, "I just lost The Game" is a highly effective pick-up line.

Mental triggers that make people lose The Game

• Any sentence that begins with, "I just..."
• Seeing the person who first told you about The Game
• British people
• Anything that involves cognition of the act of remembrance
• Anything that reminds you of anything else
• Phrases involving "Lose" or "lost"
• Phrases involving the concept of winning or not winning
• Dreaming about The Game
• Waking up
• Any mention of any game
• Seeing a particular person that refuses to play The Game
• This Wikipedia article
• Diane Rehm
• Mike Church
• "Ambition" or any reference to Ambition (card game)
• Deep Throat <--- WTF!? THE KING 09:50, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
• The Prayer for the Sick
• The White Stripes
  • Additionally, white stripes in any context, for example road markings, wallpaper patterns, and so on. 80.43.45.223
• "Pump it!"
• Phrases involving "randy" or "penis", or synonyms thereof
• "URGENT RELEASE"
• Any phrase with "release" in it
• A leasing office
• "Burn!"
• Any insult
• Any phrase with "load" in it (as in, "I just lost my load!")
• "SLIPPERY SURFACE"
• A wet floor sign
• Walking into work
• Cubicles
• The number five, or any reference to it thereof (for instance, a high five)

Remember that this list is by no means complete, as everyone has their own triggers. (Try telling your friends that their girl/boyfriend is the game, for example) 80.43.45.223

Places people are known to play the game

• Columbia, Maryland, USA
• Cambridge, England
• Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Norman, Oklahoma, USA

Title

As far as I know, this game is never in real life referred to as anything but "The Game". So I propose we move the page to The Game (game), which sounds crummy, but allows us to do:

[[The Game (game)|]] -> The Game

OK with this move? zoney ♣ talk 10:13, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• It needs a retitling, sure; but I don't know if I like The Game (game) - I will, however, run with it in the absence of anything better. Kinitawowi 11:26, Oct 11, 2004 (UTC)

I've heard it under anti-memory game more recently, and I like that better than "forgetting game". We could also try The game (anti-memory). 259 20:46, 11 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree. call it the game (game). because like others, i have never heard it called anything other than the game.203.52.130.136 00:36, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)

How about we call it The "I Just Lost The Game" Game? That phrase seems to get hits on Google at least. --Clydeiii 12:52, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

In defense of the game

The game IS real but no one I've ever met calls it the forgetting game. We play it here in Maryland all the time. Ask many people from Cambridge. They know all about it. I've heard rumors that its origin is France. --Clydeiii 00:14, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

LiveJournal has a wealth of game references:

People interested in the game People interested in losing the game A blogger loses the game A Cambridge student loses the game --Clydeiii 01:52, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Surely you can't think this is a joke anymore...

Yet another blogger loses the game. Tech support staff lose the game. Webmasters lose the game. Hippies lose the game. An entire rock-gospel choir lose the game. Some dude loses the game. I lose the game AND the Mike Church game. Google loses the game. You just lost the game. --Clydeiii 02:13, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The rules restated

My roommate has a nice summary of the four rules. Perhaps these should replace the current wording of the four rules? --Clydeiii 13:52, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)

• Your friends description of the rules originate from the original set on wikipedia. These are the most common rules, that pretty much everyone plays by. THE KING 08:20, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Something to keep in mind

I stumbled upon this and find it fascinating; I had not personally heard of it before. It seems though that there is strong Deletionist sentiment against it. As a die-hard Inclusionist I have to step in to remind you of something. I am absolutely apalled at how much Google is relied upon for such things of noteworthiness. The absence of relevant hits for a phrase from Google MEANS NOTHING. Of course, it depends on the context. Use common sense. In other cases it might be meaningful, but on a page for what is clearly a mouth-to-mouth social meme? Not finding hits on a World Wide Web search engine is irrelevant. And continued use of Google as a be-all and end-all noteworthiness checker is having a detrimental effect on Wikipedia by making it more and more Internet-centric and giving a biased advantage to the Deletionists when it comes to subjects that are less covered on the Internet. Please. Don't make Google do your thinking for you. Use your own brain. Use common sense. Think. And vote Inclusionist. DG 22:02, 30 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why is it that inclusionists so often resort to petty insults? The VfD discussion has been over for weeks, your comment isn't even relevant. -- Cyrius|✎ 05:54, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why is it that deletionists so often refer to non-petty insults--like deleting? In any case it'll be plenty relevant as soon as some deletionist decides to VfD it again in a week. DG 19:14, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

That you think listing things for deletion is an insult instead of a necessary part of Wikipedia's maintenance goes a long way to explain why your initial post was so ill-tempered. There are things that belong in Wikipedia and there are things that do not. Sometimes it is hard to tell which category an article falls into.

You said "use common sense". Common sense says a game with rules as strange as this, and which cannot be found under the title given, is probably a hoax. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:31, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If it was a hoax, shouldn't the article be kept and say that it's a hoax? Diego Moya

I was one of the strong deletionists, not in general but for this article. I used google figures to prove my point, not to show that it was "not popular", but to show that the game never existed. The reason for this? The article is called "Forgetting game", but not one single website (apart from wikipedia mirrors) refers to the game by this name. Using 10, 100, or 1000 hits to prove non-notability is one thing, but zero hits sort of shows something else don't you think?

In some cases, yes. But my point was only that it's not so in all cases--that sometimes the absense of Google hits only means the absense of its presence from the Web. Which might be meaningful... but then again might not.

Of course, given that ultimately it turned out that it did have a web presence--under a different name, this was probably not the case. Nevertheless, I still think it's a point to keep in mind. DG 00:34, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

With the excess of links provided above, it can be shown that the game does exist, but it makes you wonder why the original authors didn't use the right name.. -- Chuq 22:03, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

And as for why not to use the right name... I can imagine why. When the right "name" is "the game"-- that is, I mean think about how these things start and spread. Just the game without a name. An article for The game is sort of odd. I can see where the authors would be coming from trying at getting what seems like a more decent name, sort of categorising it as such or really christening it with a real name, inventing a name for the first time. Problematic but inescapable. DG 00:34, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Why?

I just don't get it. -- Cyrius|✎ 04:36, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Because it's fun! This guy claims to know someone who hadn't lost the game in 12 years... So perhaps it's far older than we previously thought? Maybe once Google indexes Harvard's library, we can find the phrase "I just lost the game" in the works of out-of-print authors! --Clydeiii 15:21, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I think it's a fascinating example of a simple but powerful viral idea. It's also interesting how people react to the idea. Some doesn't get it at all (the best players), some embrace the idea and work to spread it and others view it with suspicion as something to be avoided or as an idea that's "evil" in some sense.

New rules

This is not the place to propose new rules to the game, or even to describe ones that you and your friends came up with. They should have to pass some standard of notability; I'm not sure what that standard could possibly be, but the only thing I can think of passing it is the grace period (since everyone does it that way anyway, instead of continuously losing). I'm glad people keep vigilantly deleting the spurious rules. RSpeer 01:58, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

Recent rule additions

Wikipedia has different policies than many other Wikis, so the "spirit of Wiki" is not a reason to add something to Wikipedia. Specifically, you shouldn't add a rule that you and your friends came up with to this page, because it's not verifiable. If you want to add random information in the "spirit of Wiki", go to one of the many Wikis that isn't an encyclopedia. RSpeer 17:17, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

Just because those who play by this variation haven't, until recently, known the game had a wikipedia entry does not mean that this is a new rule proposal. One of the cool things about the game is that there isn't a lot verifiable about it, it spontaneously pops up in all sorts of social crowds without any sort of collaboration. The argument you're making is the same argument that was being made to delete the entry alltogether. Just because *you* haven't run into it and because you can't find it online doesn't make it any less real. The grace period is *not* universal. What is more universal is that when one person loses, they don't cause everyone they're with to lose as well. (This is not universal either, I know groups who when one person loses, everyone loses).

Game-loss phrase

I firmly believe that the game-loss phrase MUST be listed as "I just lost the game," since this is one of the few Googleable phrases that gets many hits for the game. Why do people keep changing it? --Clydeiii 01:21, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The term I'm familiar with (what the extensive group I'm familiar with in Ireland uses) is S**t, I lost the game.

While that's certainly a valid game-loss phrase, does it meet the criteron of, "When you Google for the phrase, does the first hit reference The Game?" While the answer is yes, it's not obvious that the hit is really talking about The Game and the phrase only gets three hits. The phrase "I just lost the game" gets over 260 hits and its first hit is a very detailed article about The Game (though sadly it the first hit should be this article). I guess the real question is, is there a phrase that is obviously referencing the game that gets more hits than 260 and whose first hit is very obviously about the game? --Clydeiii 05:59, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I believe that "I thought about the game" is more common than "I've just lost the game" I don't know that for sure, but it's my impression, and I've certainly heard both used. The reason that "I thought about the game" doesn't show up on google is because the words I, about and the get dropped from the search for being too common. All you're searching for is "thought game" and so it's no surprise that entries about the game get drowned out. If on the other hand you google "I thought about the game" in quotation marks one of the at least two different game communities on LiveJournal is entry number. The fact that it happens to have a lower page rank than two copies of the same song lyrics on a lyrics site doesn't make it any less real. Also, "I thought about the game" is still going to get somewhat drowned out by the number of folks who might write something on the web along the lines of "I thought about the game where Sammy Sosa hit his 60th home run" or "I thought about the game we were playing, and this relationship just isn't worth the drama anymore" (Clearly that would be a blog, but you can understand how the phrase is still going to drown out references to the game).

I think it's hard for any one person to say that one game-loss phrase is more widely used than any other, but I DO know for a fact that "I just lost the game" gets Google hits, and thus it's likely that people will find their way here if enough pages with that phrase link to here and this article also contains the phrase. I'm all in favor of listing as many game-loss phrases as need be, I just get frustrated when a person comes along and deletes all of the phrases and replaces them with one that might be widely unknown. --Clydeiii 04:27, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm a permanent cheater BTW (breaking rule 1). zoney ♣ talk 11:49, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sadly for you, it's impossible to break rule #1. You break rule #3 when you fail to announce your loss to others. You still lose, you only deny others the chance to not lose for 30 minutes. You're not really doing yourself a favor and are just making the game harder for others. That's pretty unethical. Oh, by the way, I just lost the game. --Clydeiii 05:59, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In defence of the author

Definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, real. I've come across this from so many separate sources in real life, it's damn near unbelievable how many people seem to know about it. Simply because YOU haven't come across it doesn't mean it's a joke, and not all people who play inane mind games post on the Internet. It's recently erupted on the SA forums if you insist on Internet stability, but generally the people I know who play it are all stoners, far more interested in pot than net talk. Should not be deleted.

• Seconded, and my thread about it got gassed after 160 replies :( - Liface

Anons

The anons editing this page are being very immature.

• If everyone added their favorite variation of the game, this page would have a list of 100 rules on it. This isn't freaking Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, people - it should be describable in about two sentences. I'm not the only one removing various rules that people stick onto the list.
• If you have such strong opinions about what this page should contain, get a username - it's just a pseudonym - so you can stand behind your contributions, instead of just continually reposting them and taking random potshots at logged-in editors.
• The anon who commented "Rspeer, you don't even play the game" clearly doesn't understand the subject material of this article. I'm editing a page on it; therefore I know of its existence, and therefore I am playing it.
• I lost.

RSpeer 17:37, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

Variations

I've tried to reorganize the variations more informatively. Any improvements would be appreciated. Bkkbrad 2 Jun 2005