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If you have any questions, suggestions or criticisms about The Game or this FAQ please post them in our forum, email us at mail@losethegame.com, or message us with the box on the right (if we're offline please include your email address so we can get back to you).

 

What is The Game?

How do I play The Game?

Online poker, like The Game, but you can win money! :D

What are the official rules of The Game?

As the origins of The Game are uncertain, and it spreads mainly by word-of-mouth, there are numerous variants and interpretations, and no official rules as such. The three rules stated on our homepage represent the core rules that we have found to be most commonly played. The original version of The Game (see below) was simply a game that you lost by thinking about the game itself, and telling someone else every time you lost just made sense.

Some common additional rules played by many people are as follows:

Following loss there is a period of time known as a “grace period”, usually 10-30 minutes, during which the player cannot lose again. In other words, thinking about The Game during the grace period does not constitute loss.

A number of players believe that The Game ends once either the British Prime Minister, the Queen of England or the Pope announces their loss on national television. Although we do not believe this will bring about the end of The Game, we do believe that it will make lots more people lose. Click here to help us make the British Prime Minister lose The Game!

It has been proposed that Chuck Norris is the only person capable of winning The Game. We plan to contact him to ask him if this is true.

How many people are playing The Game?

map

Some interpretations state that everyone in the world is playing The Game, but the exact number of people who are aware of The Game is impossible to determine and is growing all the time. However, it is certain that millions of people are losing The Game across the world. Some evidence supporting this includes:

I hate The Game!

Do you think The Game should be banned, censored or made illegal? Some people feel that The Game is purposeless and find other people playing it annoying or disruptive. The Game has annoyed some people to such an extent that it has been banned at SomethingAwful.com, GameSpy.com, Fairless High School (Ohio), Massaponax High School (Virginia) and Keesler Air Force Base (Mississippi).

Documentaries explaining The Game

Further questions

Under most interpretations and variants The Game cannot be won, and there can be no final victory. Some people interpret the rules so that when you are not thinking about The Game (not losing) you are winning. More extreme variations pose that The Game will end or that everyone will win if either the British Prime Minister or the Queen of England loses The Game on national television. Although we don't believe it will make The Game end, we've started a campaign to get the Britsh Prime Minister to lose The Game on national television, click here to find out how you can help.

As The Game cannot be won, there are two potential objectives; to lose as little as possible, or to make other people lose more than you. The authors of this website has chosen the second of these options as our strategy. We make thousands of people lose every day and aim to infect the entire world with The Game. If you want to make your friends lose more often, or help us in our mission to make the world lose, please check out our strategies page.

The only penalty for losing The Game is having to announce your loss to others. Loss is only temporary, as soon as you stop thinking about The Game you stop losing.

This can happen temporarily if two people think about The Game at the same time. This becomes increasingly common The Game becomes more strongly associated with different ideas within a group of friends.

The only rule that can logically be broken is Rule 3. Many people choose to break this rule in certain situations, and some people never announce their loss.

Whenever you think about The Game, you lose, and if you choose to follow the rules you have to tell other people that you've lost. Usually this is done by saying something like "I just lost The Game", although different players announce their loss in different ways. Check out our forum for lots of examples of what people say when they lose.

In situations where speech is not possible or appropriate, some players have developed non-verbal ways of announcing loss, including sign language either for "game" or simply just "G", tracing the letters in the air, passing notes, or subtle actions that have previously had the intended meaning explained, such as rubbing their head or scratching their nose.

If you are aware that you have lost The Game, but you don't tell anyone, you have broken Rule 3 and are cheating. If you think or talk about The Game but don't announce your loss because you haven't realised that you have lost, then this does not constitute cheating under some interpretations.

It is possible for people someone to the think about or discuss The Game without realising that they have lost, and hence don't announce it. As they have not consciously broken Rule 3 this does not constitute cheating under some interpretations. The concept of "thinking about The Game" can be interpreted as a range of distinct mental states:

There is no reward for playing The Game, but like most other games, it poses a challenge that players try to achieve. The strategies involved in making your friends and strangers lose more than you are fun and the mental associations that become linked to The Game are also interesting to players. If you're looking for games with a reward, you'd be better off playing your favorite casino games.

Some players believe that you have no choice to play The Game, as stated by the rules. They would argue that anyone who claims not to play The Game is actually playing, but simply choosing to break Rule 3 by not announcing they have lost The Game every time they think about it. Participation in a game requires neither consent to play or awareness of its existence. For example, whoever reads the previous sentence wins this example game. You won this game even though you were unaware you were playing it.

Although some people would argue otherwise, The Game does fit into most definitions of a game; it involves a number of players trying to acheive an objective.

The original definition of a meme, coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1970s, is any information that can be stored and replicated by human minds. This makes The Game, and every other idea and concept, a meme by definition. The more recent usage of a meme as a rapidly spreading concept (usually online) also applies to The Game. In terms of memetics, The Game is interesting as its rules represent the fundamentals of memetic replication. The Game is simply a concept that by its nature is thought about and then replicated to other human minds. Unlike most other memes, replication is its sole purpose.

There are two types of viruses recognised by science:

We would like to propose that The Game is an example of another kind of virus:

Gameology (pronounced game-ology) is a term we have coined for the study of The Game, and more precisely, why people lose. There are countless causes of loss, ranging from the obvious to the very abstract.

In order to research The Game and Game-related behaviour, we have devised a version of The Game known as a Gameological Self-Assessment (GSA). This includes an addition to Rule 3, whereby players must not only announce their loss, but also write down the time and cause of loss.

No. Rule 1 states that you are playing The Game all the time. You lose if you think about The Game at any time.

Although not within the standard rules, one variant requires that, upon losing, players explain the rules of The Game to anyone who is unaware of them. Another variant requires that a warning/disclaimer is given before explaining The Game to those unaware.

There are score-based variants of The Game. When one person loses The Game, they lose one point and everyone they announce their loss to gains one point (loser -1, everyone else +1), or, alternatively, those present receive the lost point shared between them. In other words, everyone gains one point divided by the number of people that loss has been announced to (loser -1, everyone else +1/n where n = number of people).

This is very open to interpretation. It comes down to whether "thinking about something" requires an understanding of the nature of the thing that is being thought about. If someone asks "What is a pentagon?", are they thinking about pentagons even though they don't know what one is?

Under most interpretations, yes, you do. However, some variants do not require loss to be re-announced by everyone present. Usually, although everyone has lost, the initial loser is "blamed" for the loss of the group. An anology would be a team losing a game because of the action of one team member.

No. Nobody has the power to end The Game (except possibly Chuck Norris). A number of people claim that the xkcd comic really frees them from The Game, but even the comic's creator, Randall Munroe, is aware that it's just an ironic way to make you lose more. A more recent claim is that the following 4chan post ended The Game:

triples

A number of 4chan users believe that whatever is written in a post ending in triple digits becomes true. It could be argued that this post spawned a new version of The Game that can be ended by a 4chan triple. The Game (4chan version) ended according to its rules, and thinking about it no longer caused you to lose (that version). However, thinking about The Game (original version) still causes you to lose (the original version), as it is a concept that does not include the 4chan triples modification.

Regardless of interpretation, three weeks later...

4chan

No. Although many 4chan users have helped infect the world with The Game, including those responsible for the awesomeness that made TIME magazine lose The Game, The Game was not created on 4chan. 4chan (.com) was created in 2003 (before being moved to .org in 2004) whereas the earliest known online mention of The Game was posted in 2002.

The Game World Championship is a global contest to determine the best player of The Game in the world. This involves participation in a "thinking match". Two players compete for the period of one minute, announcing their loss every time they think about The Game. An independent adjudicator records the number of times each contestant loses and the winner (whoever lost the least number of times) is declared. It is within the adjudicator's power to disqualify any contestant believed to be cheating, in other words, if they are suspected of thinking about The Game without announcing it. If you would like to organise qualifiers in your area please contact us. Regional champions will be invited to compete with each other via webcam and a World Champion will be declared on Lose The Game Day each year.

LoseTheGame.com's original idea for "The Game World Championship" is a global contest that is won by the person who has lived the longest without ever losing The Game. At the time we devised the idea, we named Edna Parker as the champion, as we assumed she had never lost The game since her birth in 1893. We sent Mrs Parker a letter to congratulate her, but unfortunately, upon reading the letter she lost The Game and was out of the Championship. More unfortunately, Mrs Parker passed away a few months later.

 

 

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