Now The Netherlands are going to lose too
Think about it, and you`ve lost. The entertaining bit is that others lose as well, the moment you start tallking about it. This is The Game, an annoying little hype thats getting more and more popular every day.
You could be on a toilet in London and see it scratched in the door. You lose The Game. You lost what? The Game. Pay attention, this can be rather confusing. The Game exists because you know it does. You are now playing and the only thing you can do to win is to forget about it again. Just think of something else. As soon as you are somehow reminded of The Game, you lose and you have to tell someone. These are the rules with which hundreds of thousands of people around the world play The Game.
It is gaining ground, mainly through the internet. There are more than a hundred Facebook groups dedicated to The Game, most of which are moderated from the UK or the United States, the biggest one has around 90,000 members. The messages shared on the sites mostly come down to the same thing: ‘I lost’.
A couple of years ago, British teacher Jonty Haywood (26) started the website losethegame.com. ‘The number of people visiting my site has increased over the years to a current rate of 3000 new visitors every day,’ he writes in an email. ‘The Game is rather like a mental virus, and it's very contagious.’
Once you have lost The Game by thinking about it, the cool bit is to make others lose too. This can be done in a fast and effective way, say through text, email or msn. But there are less direct ways as well. ‘I lose’ scratched on toilet doors in London, the graffiti on New York bridges, and banknotes with ‘you have just lost the game’ scribbled in the corner. Rumour has it that there is a highschool in Ohio where The Game is prohibited because the avalanches of ‘I lose,’ were making it impossible to teach.
Nobody knows when it started. Jonty set up his website to find out about the roots of The Game. ‘I started an online family tree, where people recorded who had told them about The Game,’ he says. The online references went back to 2001. The Game might have started at Finchley Central, a London station, after the last train had left. A couple of men had to wait for hours before the first train would arrive and they tried not to think about their long wait. Who thought about it, lost. And there you go, the birth of The Game. The discussion is in almost academic wording, Jonty talks about the ‘Fichley Central Hypothesis.’ The debates on Facebook about the rules of the Game are pretty serious as well. The main discussion is about the philosophical question, whether everyone in the world plays, or only those who know about it.
According to some players, the Game ends when the British Prime Minister has said that he has lost on national televsion.
Jonty would like to see the whole world lose. Now that a Dutch newspaper has written about The Game, our country plays - and loses - as well. ‘I can only wish you luck. This is The Game. Now forget it!’
