88% of you just lost the game

I’m sorry, but you’ve lost the game and it's time to start over. After a Massive Magazine Instagram poll, we found that 88% of readers know what ‘the game’ is, while 12% do not.  

Creative Media Production student Sophie Hamilton said, “it's one of the most amazing games there is, there's only one rule, don’t remember it.” For the 12% that don’t know what ‘the game’ is, don’t feel bad, even Massive’s editor Mason didn’t know! ‘The game’ is very simple. You are always playing, but you can never win. As soon as you remember the game, you lose and you have to start over. You must announce that you’ve lost the game before restarting. And now that I’ve told you what ‘the game’ is, you cannot stop playing.  

Hamilton was on a one year streak of forgetting the game before I reminded her, whoops. She said ‘the game’ was a bonding moment for her friends when they were younger. “It was funny, we would always argue over the game and how stupid it is.” She first learnt about it in primary school, “it’s like an inside joke for anyone born around the 2000’s and the 90’s”.  

No one really knows how ‘the game’ came about, but lots of people have claimed to have invented it. One theory is that of Russian author Leo Tolstoy who made up a game with his brother in 1840. They had to stand in a corner and try to not think about a white bear. Another theory involves members of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society, who created a game called the ‘Finchley Central’ in 1976. The first person to think about the Finchley Central train would lose.  

In 2005, ‘the game’ started to reemerge when a site called LoseTheGame.com was launched. Then, youtubers started to make videos about ‘the game’ and how to play it. Around 2012 and 2013 the memes began, one of the first being of scrabble with the words ‘you just lost the game’ laid out. Since then, everyone started to learn what ‘the game’ was, and here you are losing it.  

Now, go out into the world and tell anyone and everyone about ‘the game’. The goal is that one day, everyone on earth will be playing.