You Just Lost The Game

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There's this thing that millions of people are doing and yet no one discusses it in public.

And just anecdotally, when I run into groups of people, if I mention the game, usually like half the people in the room have been playing the game, and yet they're like the other half of the country has no idea this is even a thing.

By listening to this episode, you're going to lose the game.

You're going to lose it a lot.

My first strong memory of playing the game was going to my brother's wedding and then trying to get my brother to associate the phrase, I do, with, I just lost the game, so that you'd have to lose it at the altar and then admit to as much.

That's Forrest Wickman, the culture editor of Slate.

He's been playing the game since the mid-2000s.

He did not lose the game at the altar.

People may be relieved to know, though immediately after the the wedding, he came up to me like a little teary-eyed and then lost the game.

Okay, if you keep listening to this episode, there is no going back because you can't unlearn the game.

And once you learn it, you can never stop playing it.

So turn off this episode right now if you don't want to know what it is.

We're going to give you five seconds.

Okay, here it is.

You lose the game by thinking about the game.

When you think about the game, you have to say, I just lost the game.

And that's it.

That's the game.

And I just lost the game.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willip Haskin.

For a handful of you, this episode may sound familiar.

Back in 2018, we made another episode called the Incannabula Papers, and in it, we hit a bunch of honestly pretty difficult clues that led to a special bonus episode.

This episode.

An episode only a few hundred people have heard until now.

Basically, we're opening up the Decodering Vault and letting this episode out with just a few updates.

And this episode is about the mind game known as the game.

It's silly and harmless, but also infectious and unforgettable.

If you already know of it, there's a good chance you learned about it around the year 2010 or earlier this year on TikTok.

But it goes back further than that.

It's an analog viral phenomenon with roots in psychology, game shows, and a British science fiction club.

So today, on Decodering, where did the game come from?

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Okay,

so I learned about the game making this episode about the game.

Benjamin Frisch, Dakota Rings producer, has been playing the game since the late aughts, and he reported this story story out.

In retrospect, it made that trip really memorable to me and helped bond me to people I didn't know so well.

And in talking with other people, it's clear that I'm not alone.

Dan Check is Slate's CEO.

It is the first thing out of your mouth, I think, when you see me typically, which is pretty great.

For whatever reason, I associate you with the game, but the opposite doesn't really happen.

So I lose the game first, and I say, I just lost the game.

And we both kind of titter a little bit.

It becomes a greeting ritual at that point.

The idea that the harder you try not to think of a thing, the harder it is not to think of that thing, isn't new.

There's a Dostoevsky quote from 1863.

Try to pose for yourself this task, not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

In 1987, the social psychologist Daniel Wegner came across that quote and decided to do an experiment with it.

He told participants to sit for five minutes and not think think of a white bear, and every time they did think of a white bear, to ring a bell.

They rang the bell a lot.

The game relies on exactly this human habit, and turns it into, well, a game.

When one person loses the game and announces that they have lost the game, everyone else in the vicinity must also necessarily lose the game, having been reminded of its existence.

Unlike most games, you can never win the game.

There are only two states of play.

Either you have forgotten about the game, temporarily, or you have lost it.

Now, some people include another rule, that when someone declares that they have thought about the game, it creates a temporary immunity period in which other people may think about the game without losing it.

allowing someone to win the game, in a sense.

This is not a universal rule, though, and it remains controversial.

And that's in part because the game, being this weird, amorphous, difficult-to-pin down thing, makes figuring out what the rules are pretty difficult.

But if there is an established authority on the game, it's probably John T.

Haywood who created the website lose the game.net in 2005.

And I was kind of just playing it as most people do, like occasionally thinking about it and losing it.

Really, I wanted to just kind of develop my web design skills and didn't have any idea what to make a website about.

But I was searching up the game online and couldn't really find much about it, so I thought I'd make my website about the game.

John T.

Haywood is from Cornwall in the UK, and he seems like the kind of gentle prankster who'd be really into the game.

Famously, in Cornwall at least, he started a website in 2007 for Cornwall's most beautiful beach, Porthemet Beach, a huge, almost tropical strip in North Cornwall filled with beautiful wildlife and topless sunbathing.

A beach that doesn't exist.

Janti's website about the game became a nexus for information, and in a real way, an authority on the rules, records, and notable events regarding the game.

Johnti's rules are as follows.

One, you are playing the game.

You, along with everyone else in the world, always is, always has been, and always will be playing the game.

Neither awareness nor consent is required to play.

Two, every time you think about the game, you lose.

Loss is temporary.

As soon as you forget about the game, you stop losing.

The objective of the game is to forget that it exists.

Good luck.

3.

Loss of the game must be announced.

Every time you think about the game, and hence lose, you must say so.

This is the only rule that can be broken.

But do you really need to cheat?

John T notes that the idea of grace periods are a common addition, but they are not included in his classic rule set.

John T is also a notable figure in the lore of the game, not just for collecting resources on it, but for single-handedly spreading the game to thousands and thousands of people.

According to John T, his Facebook group devoted to celebrating and spreading the game was hugely popular.

Before Facebook changed their group system, they basically deleted all the groups at one point.

There were like 200,000 members in the Facebook group.

A hit counter on his website currently stands at over 4.8 million, in his words, infected.

The heyday of the game, on the internet at least, was in the late aughts and early 2010s.

This was a time when the concept of virality was coming into everyday use, and the game was a perfect, if extremely analog, example of how an idea can spread in the digital age.

A rash of notable pranks having to do with the game happened around this time.

In 2009, the site 4chan rigged Time magazine's online poll of the 100 most influential people, so that the first letter of each name on the list spelled out a lewd form in joke, followed by the words, also the game.

In the same year, Christopher Heatley, a man from Belfast in Northern Ireland, Ireland, won a prize from Cadbury, the chocolate company, and got to put a message of his choice on two roadside billboards in Belfast.

His choice was, you just lost the game.

Since then, references to the game have showed up all over the place, but especially on social media, and most recently on TikTok, where thousands of people have been losing the game since lockdown.

You just lost the game.

You just lost the game.

Hey, everyone, guess what?

What?

What?

I just lost the game.

I lost the game!

Once you know it exists, you start to notice the game all over the English-speaking world.

It's pretty much endemic at this point.

So now we turn to the big question.

How did this happen?

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No one knows for sure exactly where the game came from, but I think it's pretty likely that it evolved from a mind game, a totally different mind game, played by British students in the late 1970s.

This was in days when there really wasn't any kind of proper geek culture.

That's Nicolo,

a classic scholar at Royal Holloway College in London, who was a PhD student at Cambridge at the time.

There was a science fiction society in Cambridge, a student science fiction society, which met in a pub once a week.

So, you know, it was the age of punk.

There was this kind of punkish sort of attitude to the ways in which we were

thinking about maths as a tool for kind of exploding people's heads and,

if possible, the foundations of reality with it.

In this science fiction club, one of the games people were playing was called Finchley Central, which dates back to at least 1969, when its rules were detailed by the mathematicians David Fowler and Anatole Beck in an issue of Manifold magazine.

According to that article, the rules are as follows.

Two players alternate naming the stations of the London Underground.

First, to say Finchley Central wins.

It's clear the best time to say Finchley Central is exactly before your opponent does.

You could, of course, say Finchley Central on your second turn.

In that case, your opponent puffs on his cigarette and says, well, shame on you.

In other words, you can win at any time.

You just have to say Finchley Central.

But if you say Finchley Central right away, that's bad form, bad sportsmanship.

After all, it ends the game just as it begins.

You can see how it's related to the game, but with a key difference.

You can actively win Finchley Central.

There's also a game very similar to Finchley Central that prepared later in 1989 on the BBC comedy panel show, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

The rules are exactly the same, but the winning phrase is another London tube station, Mornington Crescent.

Now we're going to play the game called Mornington Crescent.

Fulham Palace Road, Marylebone Station, Seven Sisters Road.

Oh.

Oh, hoist with his own petard.

It's ours in three.

Pow-Mall.

Charlotte Street.

Mornington Crescent.

And John.

So obviously, you know, any player can win at any point in the game.

And this was

a kind of game that

the mathematical model of game theory

couldn't do anything with.

Nick and a group of his science fiction society friends would play Finchley Central together, and at some point the game evolved.

One of us came up with a suggestion that you could have a variant in which you win not by saying Finchley Central first, but simply by thinking of it first.

And then it was a very small step from there to an even more interesting variant where instead of winning by thinking of Finchley Central first, you lost by thinking of it.

So you lose the game the moment you think of the winning move in the game, which is the only move you can sensibly make.

The society loved this version of Finchley Central and started passing it down within the society from year to year.

Nick Hobson recalls that there was one man, Mark Haslett, who wasn't there for its inception, but who was really into it.

Mark in particular, I think, was the kind of typhoid Mary of this particular mimetic virus.

He kind of spread it out to everyone he met.

Nick says that you were the person who was like telling telling everybody about it.

Well, that's Nick for you.

That's Mark Haslett, Nick's former roommate.

He's retired now, and for what it's worth, doesn't remember his enthusiasm for this version of Finchley Central being quite as extreme as Nick remembers it being, but he was nonetheless a major part of its origin.

You know, your head's just caught up by it.

I mean, there were some people who got so into it as a metagame that you kind of almost felt like when you weren't thinking about Finchley Central, that was a meta loss.

Your part of your head was just permanently thinking about Finchley Central.

Oh Lord, if we'd stumbled across a game that was spectacular as evictive as Finchley Central is.

Damn good thing we didn't find one that was dangerous.

Eventually, Nick and Mark and all of their friends left Cambridge and sort of forgot about Finchley Central.

And I never knew about the game until about 10 years ago.

It started appearing in

the British press, and it was the first time that I knew that it's gone out in the world.

All my students turned out to know about it, and

I was kind of one of the last to know.

And I got in contact with

Mark and with other people

who had been part of that original.

And we were all completely baffled.

None of us knew that the game had become this thing.

This is kind of

a sobering life lesson, really, that all the

high-minded attempts to be a scholar and a teacher that

have driven many of our careers since,

they pale into insignificance

beside having a kind of collaborative hand into creating one of the stupidest ideas in human history.

Mark Haslett told me that every decade or so, some journalist comes poking around asking about it.

And in the intervening time, he hasn't thought too much about Finchley Central.

He doesn't see his old college buddies that often, after all.

Well, presumably, there was a long, maybe decade-long period where you didn't.

No, no, no, there is no such thing as winning Finchley Central.

That's the point.

It only has one rule, and that's how you lose.

I mean, the idea of the immunity period is basically so that you can enjoy having won the game.

But that.

You can't win the game.

That's the point.

Oh, dear.

No, no, you're clearly missing the point.

I am realizing that

this rule feels very American to me because we have to win everything.

Yeah, well, exactly.

And I'm very British, and I think it's funny that you have a game where it's impossible to win because the only rule is how you lose.

There's still a hole in the story.

I couldn't find anyone who could explain to me exactly how Finchley Central turned into the version of the game that we know today.

We're thinking about the game itself, rather than thinking about a London tube station makes you lose.

If I had to guess, I suspect it probably has something to do with Finchley Central spreading beyond the greater London area.

No doubt, part of the fun of Finchley Central was losing Finchley Central every time you saw the name on a map or a signpost.

But when you don't live anywhere close to Finchley Central, why should you think of it at all?

When players moved away from London, they probably just dissolved the tube station entirely, and the game became fully self-referential.

The game is such a simple, basic idea.

It almost seems like something that has always existed.

Like it wasn't something that was invented.

It was just discovered.

And I think that's because it corresponds to something very basic about human psychology.

Which brings me back to that Dostoevsky quote from earlier about the polar bear.

In psychology, the phenomenon of not being able to think about something you don't want to think about is called ironic process theory.

The way that the mind, when it tries not to think of something, seems incapable of letting it go.

Ironic process theory is this idea that when we engage in thought suppression, there's this ironic rebound effect which Nick Hobson is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Toronto.

We have two systems in our in our mind or brain.

So we have our one system which tells us, you know, consciously and deliberately, don't think about this thing, don't have this thought or this idea.

So when we tell ourselves not to have a particular thought or an idea, that sets off this unconscious monitoring process and it sort of checks in every so often to make sure that we're not thinking about X, but as a result of monitoring for X, well, then X comes to mind.

And that is the irony, which is sort of like a flaw in the design of our psychology

through evolution.

And

this is the outcome of it.

We all experience some amount of ironic processing in everyday life, like when you get a really annoying song stuck in your head.

But ironic process theory isn't just about frivolous things.

I would make the argument that as we see it manifested in everyday psychology, that it does sort of tend to be more negative when you start to think about

people with anxiety and mood disorders and PTSD.

In a mental health context, ironic processing is a way that painful memories can reassert themselves.

It's a way that depression and anxiety disorders manifest.

And it's a way negative thoughts burrow deeper and deeper into the mind.

What I love about the game is that it trades on this odd, potentially dark thing inside of us, this flaw in human cognition, and turns it into a completely harmless prank.

It diffuses it, it turns it into a kind of bonding agent.

And that's not silly or frivolous at all.

It's actually kind of beautiful.

We all kind of went our separate ways, and some of us remained more in touch than others.

So

the game became a sort of little rebonding thing every time

we

get back in touch.

And

so

it's part of your relationship.

It was part of this kind of shared madness.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willip Haskin.

I'm Benjamin Frisch.

Thanks for listening.

This episode was written by Benjamin Frisch and produced by Benjamin Frisch and Willa Paskin.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Special thanks to Forrest Wickman for suggesting this topic and to June Thomas, Haley Gavin, Danielle Hewitt, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

See you next week.

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