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Extraordinary Claim w/o Extraordinary Evidence

The claim that any game or meme has worldwide scope is an extraordinary one. In the case of Chess, there is no reasonable doubt, and many sources are available. In the case of Monopoly the claim is somewhat dependent on the manufacturer's sales figures, but as it is a publicly-held corporation, those are subject to audit. In this instance, we have one article from Belgium. The claim that the Game has worldwide scope strikes me as odd in the face of such a paucity of sources. I therefore felt it appropriate to properly label the claim as a claim, not a fact. Robert A.West (Talk) 21:11, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

I think that "worldwide" is a reasonable interpertation of the translation of the article. Unless we have reason to doubt it's veracity, it is saying that there are players in multiple countries on multiple continents. Darquis 05:49, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
The issue is not that the article claims a worldwide phenomenon: the issue is that if this claim is true, the assertion should exist in multiple sources. The lack of other sources casts doubt upon the claim accordingly. Suppose a single newspaper claimed that a certain person had won the Nobel Prize, and no other newspaper mentioned it? Would you take that claim seriously? I wouldn't. Now, it may be that other major media will mention The Game soon enough, in which case it would be appropriate to remove any qualifying text. As it stands, to present the claim of worldwide distribution as consensus, as opposed to a single-source claim, would be IMO misleading. Robert A.West (Talk) 16:47, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't think the example fits, because there is a difference between a game that can't really be marketed (like, say, Monopoly or Chess) and a series of awards that have decades of history and are incredibly well noted.
I think think that hte problem with looking for other sources making the same or a similar claim is no other acceptable source has written about this. If you consider the subject, it's not exactly material that's something a newspaper would typically write about. Hopefully we'll see something soon, but in the interim, I'm not sure we should exclude material that does exist in the article. Darquis 06:26, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
I hope I said nothing about exclusion. I merely advocate that the source be named explicitly, as it currently is. Robert A.West (Talk) 23:50, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Strategy

This article now appears to be massively improved (most particularly in that it now acknowledges that it is a meme, not a game). The "strategy" section still looks like original research and cruft, I think it should go. Just zis Guy you know? 21:20, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Can you please explain how it isn't a game? -GTBacchus(talk) 21:22, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm also curious, since the De Morgen article seems to call it a game. Presuming that source meets WP:V, it is therefore citably a game. And meme just has too many different meanings (by many definitions any thought is a meme). JoshuaZ 21:41, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Just zis Guy you know? Please read the meme article. Calling The Game a meme is completely redundant. If your still not clear, read my last comment to the The name of "The Game" section above. As for The Game being a game, this seems clear to me, but before you explain to us why you think its not a game, please read the archived discussions where I have spent hours discounting a number of supposed reasons. The strategy section is based on sourced information. Kernow 23:33, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
JzG: as the author of the strategy section, I challenge your claim against its verifiability; the section is 100% derived from source (italics are from Talk:The Game (meme)#Translation):
The Game has no set rule defining a "winning" player (The ultimate victory does not exist, the Game never ends.), but participants can measure their performance by comparing how often they lose relative to their opponents. Thus, strategy in these games consists of attempts to make one's opponents lose while minimizing one's personal losses. (The ultimate strategy is, of course, to remind the competition of the Game as often as possible, without being reminded of it yourself.) Students in the United Kingdom playing The Game have been reported to leave messages on blackboards and pieces of paper for other players to later come across. (In the UK, fanatics have developed several strategies to make their fellow players lose. They write "The Game" in big letters on the chalkboard in front of the class, they hide little notes saying that the finder of the note has lost.)
Perhaps a footnote would be in order to make this clear to the reader? ~ PseudoSudo 01:20, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
Since you assert the stragtegy section is not original research, please cite the reliable sources from which it is taken. It never ends? Bollocks. It ends when you decide to stop "playing" it. Simple, really. Just zis Guy you know? 08:43, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
Bit confused; I just did cite them. The italics are quotes from the De Morgen article. By a footnote, I meant a <ref> tag in the section.
See, that statement you made (It never ends? Bollocks. It ends when you decide to stop "playing" it.) is classic original research. You challenged a quote from the source, claiming something different that seemed intuitive to you (and quite understandably so!). However, being blunt, that is exactly the type of thought that we need to steer clear of in this article, as unless every fact stated can be backed up by a quote from a reliable source, it will end up in the state it was in when it was first deleted. ~ PseudoSudo 10:20, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
I see. So the "fact" that it never ends is verifiable, whereas the ide that one can simply decide not to play is OR. Once again this article turns my understanding of policy on its head; a worldwide phenomenon predominantly of the US and UK, vbut without a single English-language source, a single mention in a single newspaper sufficient to fulfill WP:V and WP:RS despite the lack of references in the article itself (was it culled from WP? Is this in fact self-referential?). The game never ceases to surprise. 62.73.137.190 12:12, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
As I believe we have already pointed out, the country list in the De Morgen article matches no version of the Wikipedia article. This would be strong evidence that it is not based on the Wikipedia article. JoshuaZ 14:06, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
The list of countries is actually almost verbatim. In our article we had "The Game has been heard across the English-speaking world, especially in the United Kingdom and the USA - most evidence suggests that The Game's origins lie in these two countries. It has spread across Europe, and as far afield as Australia, Brazil, Japan and Israel." That's the exact same list, with the exclusion of Israel. —Seqsea (talk) 15:55, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Ever

I've been sitting and thinking about this for about a half hour, and have come to a terrifying conclusion. Feel free to talk some sense into me if I'm missing the big picture or something, but:

If the Belgian article is under contestation as verifiable because it doesn't offer reliable sources itself, and the extremely capable and for-some-reason-not-busy-with-other-stuff Wikipedians including myself can't find ANY other traditioinal sources, not even one, how would an article in the New York Times be able to be cited as verifiable either? What would it use as its sources that we would consider reliable? And taking that one step further.... how will The Game EVER become traditionally verifiable? Old, sturdy sources aren't going to be found, it's just a fact- anything usable is going to come from new articles being printed in reliable sources.

Basically... what is it going to take for this article and others like it, that don't have go-to sources or known origins, and are this inherently memetic, to be considered veriafiable and allowed to stay? If 10 years from know I log on to Wikipedia and no trace of this phenomenon can be found, I think it'll be a sad day. Isn't an reexamination of policy maybe in order here?--128.227.95.149 23:20, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, here's what it would look like, in the ideal case:
You start with articles like those in the Belgian paper, and the one in Insert Credit. Those are primary sources, as are all the blogs and usenet postings. A bunch of those get written, and indexed, and stored away. At some point, some kind of sociological reasearcher comes along and wonders about The Game. She digs up those primary sources, evaluates them using her scholarly expertise, and gets her research published by a known reliable publisher. That makes her a secondary source, who is trustworthy because she is qualified to analyze primary sources and put them in a proper academic context, because her publishers demand that she be qualified in that way. We, the tertiary source, base our confidence in our information on the trustworthiness of the secondary sources we cite. The only reason we can justify keeping the article now is that the one source cited, although a primary source, comes from a respected publisher. -GTBacchus(talk) 04:32, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Insert Credit

I'd actually like to get a discussion going about the Insert Credit source.

If we can put aside the fact that this article is being used as a Wikipolitical football, what's wrong with this source? It's not somebody's personal blog. It belongs to a corporation (Audmark Inc.) Sites like this are cited legitimately by Wikipedia articles all the time. I'd like a better explanation of how this site fails WP:RS, not just a terse "no blogs please". rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 23:29, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Here's the link in question, which I deleted, with the terse edit summary. I figured if someone said something.... and here we are. I actually hadn't seen the section above where this came up before, but now I have. Insert Credit is a gaming review site. I think the blog-like appearance is to make it "hip", and "edgy". Looking more closely... I'd say it's borderline, as far as WP:RS. It seems well respected among gamers, and their regular writers apparently get published in Wired sometimes, or at least someone said so in a blog. I have no idea whether they apply basic journalistic standards there. I'm pretty sure they do at De Morgen.
Reading through Wikipedia:Reliable sources, I see a definition of "primary source" that both our sources seeem to fit closely. Check out the sentence in bold - We may not use primary sources whose information has not been made available by a reliable publisher - De Morgen passes, but who is the reliable publisher in the case of Insert Credit? Audmark, Inc.? Who are they? Ah, a marketing firm in LA. That's practically synonymous with integrity. That leaves us with one usable primary source, and one questionable one. Although it's not consistently enforced, we claim that all our articles should be based on secondary sources. In practice, we use a mixture of secondary and primary sources, and sourceless material, and we try to keep it on some sort of gradient where the sourcing gets better, not worse, over time, and where unsourced material is eventually removed. This article is starting out pretty low on that gradient, and I don't see that Insert Credit moves it up. On the other hand, you're right: it's not a blog.
What does it take to verify the existence of a concept? A couple of people talk about it, out loud? Since the discussing of it makes it exist, that's not in question, but there is some question of whether we're being used to help it bootstrap itself into further existence, and we are. To some degree, as Wikipedia grows, this sort of thing is unavoidable, but we should try to minimize it, by being somewhat scrupulous about just how much we want to lower the bar for memes. If The Game is "viral", as Insert Credit claims, do we really want to become the biggest vector so far for spreading it? (Have we already?) -GTBacchus(talk) 03:19, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
We should be more worried about spreading the Gospel of Hermes than something that exists because someone says it exists like this game/meme/whatever. Kotepho 03:34, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
"Worried" - I hope none of us is losing any sleep over it. I just don't think we should turn Wikipedia into a free-for-all for memes. We're susceptible of that. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:47, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
People aren't going to go and make a bunch of meme articles just because this one gets kept (slippery slope fallacy. I'm impressed by how well this situation is being handled, actually, and I'm happy with the new article. --Liface 05:34, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
a) Slippery slope is not always a fallacy - cigarette use, for example, is a very real slippery slope. b) I'm not invoking slippery slope here. I'm saying, hey, let's go ahead and take pride in being an encyclopedia with some standards about what we accept as a reliable source. Why lower the bar? -GTBacchus(talk) 15:24, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for looking into the background of Insert Credit. This leaves me with about the same opinion as when I first saw the site - it won't give this article much extra verifiability, but it is a source we can cite facts from so that we're not just parroting one newspaper article. The facts we'd be citing would be uncontroversial. I could understand an objection if Audmark had some conflict of interest where reporting on The Game in a biased or erroneous matter would help them market something, but that's pretty implausible.
Also, I don't think this is a primary source for our purposes. I don't want to describe in the article what some non-notable writer for Insert Credit thinks about the game; I want to report the same facts about the game that he reports and cite his article, making it a secondary source. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 04:39, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
From the linked article, apparently written in 2004:

Another patron, an older gentleman, stood with the dim lights of recognition in his eyes. Turning, responding without sadness or anger, he stated, “I haven’t thought about the game in 12 years.”

12 years? Even charitable sources don't have this thing extending back much past the late 1990s. Are we to believe that some random dude encountered in a pub has been "playing" since at least 1992? And then there's the guy who supposedly learned about the Game in the jungles of Borneo.
Doesn't it seem that a more likely explanation is that the writer is putting us on just a bit, and that regardless of the reliability of the Web site in general, maybe we shouldn't trust this particular article to tell us the truth about anything? --phh (t/c) 15:01, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
I think we should leave it out for now. I wouldn't be surprised if The Game were that old, but the Borneo comment and the unamed person making the claim leave a lot to be desired. (We should however, remember that the article exists in case another AfD occurs). JoshuaZ 15:13, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The writer, if he's not outright lying (which Insert Credit (jokingly?) encourages in its articles), is certainly just repeating hearsay, and no journalist would use something some guy's girlfriend says a guy said to her in a bar, as a source for anything serious. (Everyone's always the most honest when talking to girls in bars, y'know.) Since The Game is what it is, urban legend-type sources are just going to be as far back as you can trace it, and that's why I say the Insert Credit article is a primary source. The author is claiming to be an "eyewitness", in the sense of actually knowing people who play the game, and having actually heard these legends about it. The only difference with the Belgian article is the De Morgen people are actually respected news publishers. -GTBacchus(talk) 15:24, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Ok, after reading their staff guidelines, there is no way this constitutes a reliable source. The De Morgen article is (in my mind) borderline reliable but this is ridiculous. Publications that encourage their writers to at best rely on anecdotes and to lie when it makes things funny cannot be considered reliable for any serious purpose. At best a line could be added noting something like "humorous origins of the game have been suggested, including a possibly fascetious claim that the game originate from the jungles of Borneo" and then I'd have a WP:N issue with mentioning that. JoshuaZ 15:33, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I'm convinced it's not a reliable source. Before knowing about the staff guidelines, I figured we'd have the common sense to sort out the facts from the humor, but the "lie when it makes things funny" part does in fact make everything too dubious to use. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 16:37, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Big deal - plenty of Wikipedia articles don't have verifiable sources. The game exists, it is fact, it should be here on Wikipedia. But of course we can't have any respect for those who are more informed in an area - Wikipedia works by the principle of the majority view of truth - no matter how ignorant the majority are. zoney ♣ talk 11:01, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
No, Wikipedia is not a democracy and does run off of majority. JoshuaZ 13:23, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
I think the point is that those plenty of wikipedia articles should have verifiable sources, and so should this one, regardless of other articles. I agree that it is really frustrating, and i would still view this article as a special case where policy is concerned, but community consensus is community consensus. Jdcooper 11:09, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
Hah! "Community consensus"? It's merely consensus among a select few. And the article is already a special case in the amount of scrutiny it has received. Plenty of material on Wikipedia is left well alone despite being unverified. I know of hundreds of articles about ordinary things that have not one reference whatsoever - just because they seem more mundane, or people believe the content more easily, they are left alone. zoney ♣ talk 17:42, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
Please feel free to add the {{unreferenced}} tag to any article that fails to cite sources. It's true that we have a lot of unsourced content here, but we're working on it, and trying to continually improve the sourcing in our articles, and either back up or remove anything unverified that goes beyond common knowledge. The need to improve many articles is hardly an argument for letting any particular article slide. -GTBacchus(talk) 18:58, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to point out that I'm not arguing for the deletion of this article (far from it!). I wanted to know if we could cite the article from Insert Credit, and now I've been shown a good reason why not. rspeer / ɹəədsɹ 03:14, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Further explanation needed

Could someone add some more explanation of how the Game works, for slow-brainers like me who don't understand it? For example, it seems like someone playing the Game would always be thinking about it. So she would constantly be in a state of losing, or would lose many times a day. Also, anyone writing a note on a blackboard would be in a state of losing as he wrote it, and every time he thought about it afterwards. When he learned of someone seeing the note and losing, he would lose himself. Is all this correct? If not, someone should explain further in the article. Thanks Cam 14:25, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Yep, you seem to have got it down. Some of my friends lose 10-12 times a day, which is getting close to the max if you're playing with 30 minute time limits. --Liface 15:43, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
I lose the game a lot because this page is on my watchlist. QmunkE 15:49, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
It seems ridiculous at first, but eventually your brain habituates to The Game and you begin to lose less. For example, I just read this discussion, then went and watched some TV and then lost. One day you'll lose and realise you haven't lost for years. I went for over a year without losing about a year ago. Kernow 18:00, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Winning

In the rules me and friends use, we agree that you totally win the game when you forget about the game entierly. Should this be added, or not? Homepie22:34, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

  • No. Only the basic rules (those started in the reference) can be in the article. "Unofficial" variations used by small groups are unverifiable, and will be removed. WarpstarRider 23:48, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
  • The whole point of The Game, even outside the encyclopaedia-related reasons per WarpstarRider, is that you cannot win, because once you realise you have won you have lost. That is why The Game is even a thing at all. Jdcooper 01:36, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Can you not win something without realising it? Generalmiaow 20:55, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Yes, unless the objective of the game is to not realise it, which it is here. Jdcooper 01:12, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't see how the fact that it is the objective of the Game is not to realise that you've won precludes you from winning it without realising it. A common point made about the game is that if you never hear about it again, you've won. (A friend wishes to have "I won" engraved on his headstone) 85.134.178.77 09:51, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

What's wrong with this edit?

I've seen it reverted at least twice now, but it's supported by the last couple of sentences in the Belgian article, isn't it? -GTBacchus(talk) 00:56, 23 May 2006 (UTC)


surely you personally lose the game the first time that you remember you are playing it and fail to pronounce i have lost the game you can start playing again soon. this logic works for those beginning to play, it seems that people may embark on several gamespans over the course of their gaming. i recently lost the game in a situation in which saying shit i lost the game would have been ridiculous, did i step out of the game? i think so

No, you just broke the rules of the game is all. That doesn't take you out of it..to make a comparison, if when no one is looking, I take a few grand from the bank in Monopoly, I've broken the rules (and am cheating). I can still play the game, though. So at most, you're still playing The Game, you're just cheating. Darquis 03:28, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

SaveTheGame.org

So why isn't this link in the external links? I read over the discussion above and we seemed to agree it was notable as a "fan site", also having a very linkable "compiled list of sources". -- Alfakim --  talk  14:42, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

It is a pretty good resource, but it is inherently a self-reference, as it was set up in response to the ongoing status dispute of this wikipedia article, so we can't link it. Jdcooper 15:17, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Where's The Game Played

Can someone tell me how to see the IP addresses of registered users? I've set-up a forum post to try and confirm the IP locations of players to map the spread of The Game. I was hoping to use the Wikipedia history to get an idea of how The Game spread over the last few years. Kernow 13:25, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

The IP address of a logged in user is only availble to a very small group of people under very specific circumstances - usually only for vandalism tracking as far as I know. The wikimedia:Privacy_policy has a full explanation. --HughCharlesParker (talk - contribs) 13:55, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

IP Addresses

A lot of people are adding places where The Game is played, which are being removed as unverifiable. Can we not use their IP's to verify their location? See above for the IP's I've verified so far using the losethegame.com forum. Kernow 21:35, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

That would be orginal research. --JiFish(Talk/Contrib) 21:41, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Similar to hand gesture game?

This game seems related to a similar game in which the object is to get someone to look at your hand as you make the "OK" hand gesture (often held with the "ring" on the top, like this). If someone looks at the hand gesture, they lose. Does that game have a name? --Lph 14:23, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

It's called the "Circle Game", supposedly made popular by Malcolm in the Middle. I don't exactly see how it's related, though. --Liface 15:09, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
Thanks! I see there's even an article about it. I guess to me they seem related in that one of the ways to make your opponent lose is by getting them to look at something (in one case a hand gesture, in the other case, say, a Post-it note saying "You Lose!"). And in that they are the kind of games that could go on for weeks, with each player trying more and more elaborate ways to trick the others into losing. --Lph 16:23, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
That is true, but you can lose this game even if you are just sitting alone at home (or wherever). Also, this game doesn't just go on for weeks, it goes on forever. Timrem 18:48, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Despite its reported prevalence this is the only mainstream report of The Game.

This keeps getting reverted but I don't think it's in the style expected of an encyclopedia, so I'm fine with leaving it out. --Liface 18:43, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

I think it's original research. You'd have to do a survey of things made up at school one day and see how many mainstream articles you can expect. Ashibaka tock 16:34, 5 July 2006 (UTC)
I think it's original research because it requires you to fidn out what other reports of the game there are, decide which qualify as mainstream, etc. Plus, the sentence seems to be pushing a specific POV, at least to me. I'm gonna delete it.Darquis 00:28, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
Well, then. Find one. It is an anti-memory game, and I've stood in the middle of Boston supermarkets and shouted "I lost the game!". Try it sometime. But get ready to run, because people get angry. And then check that German...or...Dutch magazine. I forget which. User:Asuka Seagull 22:17 20 August 2006 (EST)

BBC comment

BBC news magazine refers to the game (with a link to this page) - see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4638900.stm#thursdayletters (letter from Adrian Lovell, Thursday 26 Jan 2006). This was how I was introduced to the game, and I've been playing it ever since (thanks Adrian - I think!). Should this be listed, or is it a self reference?  Tivedshambo (talk) 08:30, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

losethegame.com

Without judging whether this site is reliable or unreliable, unless and until we get a better source, I suggest we at least use this one. :-) Kim Bruning 14:11, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

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