You Just Lost the Game | Spirits x American Hysteria
/Sorry to tell you, but you just lost The Game. In our first ever crossover episode with American Hysteria, we do a deep dive into the mind game with origins in Cambridge, early internet culture, and other memes of the age like the Cool S.
Content Warning: This episode contains conversations about or mentions of 4chan, sexual content, and drug use.
Housekeeping
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- Recommendation: This week, American Hysteria, hosted by Chelsey Weber-Smith!
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Cast & Crew
- Co-Hosts: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin
- Editor: Bren Frederick
- Music: Brandon Grugle, based on "Danger Storm" by Kevin MacLeod
- Artwork: Allyson Wakeman
- Multitude: multitude.productions
About Us
Spirits is a boozy podcast about mythology, legends, and folklore. Every episode, co-hosts Julia and Amanda mix a drink and discuss a new story or character from a wide range of places, eras, and cultures. Learn brand-new stories and enjoy retellings of your favorite myths, served over ice every week, on Spirits.
Transcript
AMANDA: Welcome to Spirits Podcast, a boozy dive into mythology, legends and folklore. Every week, we pour a drink and learn about a new story from around the world. I'm Amanda, and you're about to hear from Julia, because this is a special, our first ever collaborative crossover episode. We are so excited about this. We had a past and probably future guest, Chelsey of American Hysteria, talk with us about a topic that we thought would interest them. If you remember, when Chelsey was on the show, we referenced The Game. I don't even know how to describe it. The game that's not really a game where, if you think about it, you lose. And Chelsey was like, "Never heard of this before." And Julia and I were astonished, because it is such a huge part of our childhoods. So we went on American Hysteria to do a full deep dive episode all about the game, plus some other, like, memes from middle and high school that I think you are going to love. We had so much fun, and we really made this an American Hysteria X Spirits collaboration event. The whole episode follows. You are going to love it. If you are already a listener of American Hysteria, we hope you'll love it. We hope you extra love it and listen to it twice on both podcast feeds. And if you are not yet a listener of American Hysteria, I know you are going to love that podcast, so make sure you go over and check it out. You'll get the link in the description. And listen, Chelsey is fabulous. You're going to love their lens on all things, urban legends, and moral panics. We will be back next week with a brand-new episode of Spirits, and in the meantime, enjoy our crossover all about The Game with Chelsey Weber-Smith of American Hysteria.
JULIA: If we are sticking to the strictest form of the rules laid out, we are still all continuously playing the game. And at the end of the day, the real winning is completely forgetting that the game exists, therefore, I've ruined it for most of your audience.
CHELSEY: Julia Schifini and Amanda McLoughlin are the hosts of the podcast, Spirits, a history and comedy show focused on mythology, folklore, and urban legends. Each week, they pour a drink, hence, the Spirits double entendre, and deep dive into stories similar to the ones we cover here on this episode. My new friends tell me the history of an early 2000s fad called The Game, a big time phenomenon that somehow completely passed me by. And I do hate to inform you of this, dear listeners, but you have already lost the game. I'm your host, Chelsey-Weber Smith, and this is American Hysteria. I am so excited to welcome our urban legends girlies, first time on the show, Amanda and Julia. Thank you for being here
JULIA: Our pleasure. It feels like such a welcoming but we've already gotten to talk to you so much on our own show that I'm like, "Oh yeah, we're old hat at this point, right?"
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Old friends.
AMANDA: Longtime listener, first time guest. Thank you so much for having us, and for believing us that there is a full episode in this subject. We promise you there is.
CHELSEY: Okay. I'm excited. This is one of those episodes where I get to go in knowing almost nothing, which is not where I'm generally comfortable, but it's where I have some of the most fun. So I am excited to jump into this, like, very strange topic and, like, very seemingly popular phenomenon that—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —entirely passed me by.
JULIA: I will say, you're not the only one, so this—
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: —is kind of exciting.
CHELSEY: Okay. Well, why don't you take it away? Let's get started.
JULIA: Yeah. So Chelsey, I'm about to piss off a lot of your audience by telling them, unfortunately, they just lost the game.
CHELSEY: Oh. Darn.
AMANDA: Reset the clock.
JULIA: Reset the clock.
AMANDA: Reset the clock.
CHELSEY: All right. Reset the clock.
JULIA: So I really wanted to do this because we were talking about urban legends and stuff when you were on Spirits, and I mentioned The Game, kind of offhandedly, as a thing that I had assumed everyone knew about, and then you told us, "I have no idea what that is." So I'm very excited to not only give you a deep dive on The Game, but also the history of how it began, where it might have grown from, and whether or not we're still playing today.
CHELSEY: Ooh, okay. All right.
AMANDA: I'll tell you, I'll be playing 'till the day I die, Julia, because you and I met in preschool, and very occasionally, one of us will say, "I just lost the game," and that's gonna happen until one or both of us shuffles off this mortal coil.
JULIA: Yeah, that's true.
CHELSEY: Yes, right on the death bed, last words.
AMANDA: Oh, my God, wait. I didn't even think about putting it on a tombstone.
JULIA: Oh, no.
CHELSEY: Ooh.
AMANDA: Okay. Already I have to rein myself in.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. Rewind.
JULIA: So for your audience who might not know what I'm talking about, for you, Chelsey, as a reminder, The Game is essentially a mind game where the point of the game is to not think about the game. And to think about the game, it means you lose the game. So there are three rules to the game. They're pretty simple, I would say. Number one is everyone is playing the game. Sometimes it is specified as everybody in the world who knows about the game is playing the game. But sometimes it's just everyone is playing the game.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: You also cannot refuse to play the game. You are always playing the game. You can never stop playing the game.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Exactly. There's no opting out.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: It is a little creepy. I like it. Yeah.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Rule number two is whenever you think about the game, you have lost the game. Now by losing the game, that doesn't disqualify you from playing. That is not the end of the game. It's just you've lost and you continue on.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: Now, rule number three is losses must be announced with the phrase, "I just lost the game." And in my experience, this was done verbally. But as social media became popular, and that's a very important part of this story about the game is social media becoming—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —extremely popular. As social media became more popular, especially like during our high school career, posting on social media that you lost the game became more and more prevalent.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: But basically, the point of the game is to make other people lose the game.
CHELSEY: Yes. I'm getting that. I'm picking up on that.
JULIA: Gotcha. Gotcha.
CHELSEY: Uh-huh.
JULIA: So I learned about the game in high school. I want to say it was probably freshman year of high school, which means it was about 2006. Amanda, do you remember the first time you heard about The Game or remember starting to play The Game?
AMANDA: Yes. My next younger sibling learned about it when we were both in elementary school. We're about 18 months apart in our birth order. So anytime they learn something before I learned it, since I was older, it was a huge deal. So we learned it in elementary school, but firmly by middle school, by the time it was, you know, 2004 and we were in, you know, seventh, eighth grade, that was firmly The Game territory, where someone would just say it randomly in the middle of math class, and everyone goes, "Ugh."
JULIA: Yeah. And it's interesting, because, like, in my mind, it was something that everyone I knew also knew about. Like Amanda just said, you would say in the middle of the group, "I just lost the game." Everyone would groan, say it as well, and then you would move on.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: And I wanted to, like, confirm my biases a little bit in terms of the timeline of things. So this morning, as I was kind of putting the finish on the research, I texted my husband. I was like, "Hey, baby, like, when did you hear about The Game for the first time?" And he simply didn't know what I was talking about.
CHELSEY: Wow.
JULIA: Which is wild to me—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: —because we are high school sweethearts.
CHELSEY: Oh, my God.
JULIA: We went to the same high school and middle school. There is no reason that he shouldn't know about The Game, but he doesn't.
CHELSEY: Okay, I have a question.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Is your husband older?
JULIA: No, we're the same age.
CHELSEY: Interesting. Okay.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Because I graduated in 2006, so I'm—
JULIA: Okay.
CHELSEY: —a little bit older, and I'm wondering if it was one of those things that I was just a little bit too old.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Or if I was just doing something completely different with my life that wouldn't have exposed me to The Game.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: But it just seems weird. It just seems like maybe it wasn't a West Coast thing.
JULIA: Hmm.
CHELSEY: Were you all on the West Coast or where were you?
JULIA: No.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: We're both on Long Island.
CHELSEY: Okay. And maybe that comes into play.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: Yes. And I did text two of my other friends who also grew up on Long Island.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: But were, like, in different schools, slightly different age ranges. One friend slightly older than me, he remembers hearing it in seventh grade around, like, 2003, 2004.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Another one of my friends who's slightly younger, remembers hearing about it in 2005 when she was in fifth grade.
CHELSEY: Okay. And this does feel very, like, late elementary school, middle school, like fodder for fun.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Like, it just feels like that's the right age to get involved in something like The Game.
JULIA: Yeah. And it's so interesting too, because, like, in doing the research for this, I've listened to a couple of different people, like, recounting their experiences with The Game and stuff like that. And the first one I listened to, the guy was like, "Yeah, I first heard about The Game in college." And I'm like, "What? How?"
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: That seems wild, you know?
CHELSEY: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
JULIA: But interestingly, the person who said they first heard about it in college, heard about it while they were traveling through the UK, like backpacking through Europe during their college career.
CHELSEY: Wow.
JULIA: And that is going to become important later.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Ooh.
CHELSEY: And what year was that?
JULIA: I think it's all— so most of the appearances of The Game are going to become popularized in the early to mid-aughts.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: And then it becomes viral around the late aughts to early 2010s.
CHELSEY: Ooh. Okay. All right.
JULIA: So this is really interesting. I think that this is something that existed in not pre-internet times, but before Internet became a, like, monoculture.
CHELSEY: Sure.
JULIA: You know, before social media was the focus of the internet, rather than, like, funky, little websites.
CHELSEY: Yeah, we're like in AOL, instant messenger era.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Not just social media.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Yes. We're like the beginning of MySpace, and then towards the end of MySpace, going into the Facebook era is kind of, like, the timeline we're looking at here for The Game.
CHELSEY: Right. Got it.
AMANDA: And Chelsey, as one millennial microgeneration younger than you, Julia and I were having slightly inappropriate role play chats, not with each other, but with other people, on Neopets.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: So that's what we were doing with our internet connection.
JULIA: Yes, correct.
CHELSEY: I couldn't even tell you what a Neopet really is.
JULIA: That's fair. That's fair.
AMANDA: It doesn't matter. They were simply chat forums.
JULIA: And I need to stress to you that we're only four years apart. You know, that's the wild part.
CHELSEY: It is wild. I know, I know.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Things move fast these days.
JULIA: Yeah. So the peak of The Game, again, late aughts, early 2010s, particularly, it's as this more like centralized social media platforms become more popular. Talking the late stage MySpaces into Facebook, and then the height of Facebook groups in particular is kind of when The Game became extremely prevalent. Also, like YouTube as a growing platform.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Important to kind of know what the internet landscape was at the time.
CHELSEY: All right.
JULIA: This is kind of when we started seeing, like, the beginnings of virality on the internet, like the viral video, the viral post, the growth of the internet meme. This is the peak ecosystem that The Game is developing in. And so The Game is a great example of how quickly something could spread and gain traction, not only from word of mouth, but also on the internet. So a lot of us were hearing about The Game either through social media networks or as I like to refer to them and have seen it online referred to as the network of cousins.
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah. Uh-huh.
JULIA: This is what we're talking about when we're like— everyone in the United States knew about the Marilyn Manson rib story.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: You know?
CHELSEY: And it is cousins calling across the country. You're like—
JULIA: Exactly.
CHELSEY: —"Well, it appeared here, how— it just must have popped up in some sociological phenomenon," which I agree with on some— in some ways, but I do— I think the cousin theory is usually the real answer.
AMANDA: That's so cute, because I was like, "What are you gonna do? Go to camp? Like, I didn't go to sleep away camp."
JULIA: That's what I'm saying.
AMANDA: "I didn't have camp friends." Like, when did I talk—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —to somebody from California? Like—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: —not until YouTube, not until the internet.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: So true.
JULIA: But your network of cousins might have gone to camp.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: And those camp kids came from all across the country, and then you have a real Parent Trap situation going on.
AMANDA: Julia, my cousin, who was older and in AmeriCorps and stationed in New Orleans, that's the cousin who had all kinds of new curse words. And I was like—
JULIA: Of course.
AMANDA: —"I haven't even heard of these." And then I realized they're French.
JULIA: That makes sense. That checks out.
CHELSEY: Ah, cool. So cool.
Julai: So one of the reasons that The Game becomes so popular is because of this website called losethegame.com, that was run by a man from Cornwall named Jonty Haywood.
AMANDA: It's giving pseudonym.
CHELSEY: And Cornwall England.
JULIA: Cornwall England.
AMANDA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: So Haywood claims that he first heard about The Game in 2001 in Cornwall. Though there have been claims by a man in London who said that he invented The Game in 1996 with the aim, quote, of "annoying as many people as possible."
CHELSEY: A valiant thing to do.
JULIA: A valiant effort, for sure, for sure. So the first reference that we can find on the internet about The Game dates back to 2002. But again, because of how, like, decentralized the internet was back at that time, it didn't really reach its virality until those, like, late aughts, early 2000s. And people were being, as they often are with such memes, kind of weird and wild about it. There's a 4chan thing that happened where they managed to get, like, the times top 30 people to spell out something and end the game.
CHELSEY: Whoa.
JULIA: With like as an acrostic, you know, where they're like—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: —in order, they were like, "Oh, it's this word." And then end the game, which is extremely funny.
CHELSEY: Wow. Yeah, that's impressive.
JULIA: That was in 2009, I believe. And then also in 2009, a Belfast man won a contest that was hosted by Cadbury, like the chocolate company, Cadbury eggs.
CHELSEY: Oh, I love Cadbury eggs. My favorite candy in the world.
JULIA: I'm a big Cadbury egg fan, you know?
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: I love a cream egg. I'm not a caramel egg girly, but I love the cream egg.
CHELSEY: No, absolutely not.
AMANDA: That forbidden oval, I love them. Oh, that's Kinder eggs, right?
JULIA: Yes. But also—
AMANDA: Cadbury is okay.
CHELSEY: You want the little toy. That's what you want.
JULIA: So this man from Belfast, he wins this contest, and the prize for winning the contest was he got to put a message of his choice on two billboards in the city.
CHELSEY: Whoa.
AMANDA: Dangerous. We would never do that today.
CHELSEY: No.
AMANDA: Brands have learned, guys. We are the equivalent of, like, the youngest of six kids, where by the time we get there, the parents are like, "I know every trick in the book. And maybe—"
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: "—care, but, like, I know them."
JULIA: Not gonna work on me. So he, of course, chose them to both say, "You just lost the game."
AMANDA: Wow.
CHELSEY: Cool, cool, cool.
JULIA: Incredibly cool, incredibly cool. So losethegame.com, still active, by the way.
CHELSEY: Wow.
JULIA: And as of the day of this recording, it lists 5,442,325 people as being, in the website's words, "infected," quote-unquote. And also, it shows a map as to, like, where players are located, which I assume is based on, like, tracking site visits.
CHELSEY: Sure, yeah.
JULIA: And it isn't, like, necessarily that like, "Oh, the game has kind of died off since the early 2010s and the mid-aughts." On TikTok. RIP to TikTok as of, you know, the time—
CHELSEY: Yeah, we'll see.
JULIA: —this episode comes out probably. Especially during the COVID lockdowns, the virality of The Game saw a— an uptick. It became—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: —a trending meme to either tell your audience that they had just lost the game, or to announce in a video that you yourself had lost the game, thus making everyone else lose who watched the video.
CHELSEY: So COVID Entertainment was—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —going on shitty little walks.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Yep.
CHELSEY: And playing the game.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: And bird watching.
JULIA: Yep.
CHELSEY: This is what I feel like everyone got into.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: And trying unsuccessfully to, like, gather friends to do some kind of Zoom game night.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Totally. And watching Love is Blind as a collective nation.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Yes. We all got really into Tiger king and Queen's Gambit.
CHELSEY: Of course.
JULIA: You know?
CHELSEY: It's all we had, yep.
JULIA: It's all we had. And The Game, we also had The Game.
AMANDA: So Chelsey, as someone who wasn't exposed to The Game and, quote-unquote, "infected" with having lost it or having played it, does this strike you as fun? Like, what are your initial reactions to The Game and all it entails?
CHELSEY: It does not strike me as fun, mainly because I don't know how— I like a game with a strategy. I guess the—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —strategy is to make people lose, so that part—
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: —is fun. But I don't know how you win while actively playing it to make others lose. That feels like—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —there's no possible way—
AMANDA: That's right.
CHELSEY: —to do both of those things. So—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —I don't know how to play the game, really.
JULIA: That's a very interesting thought process about it, and I—
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: —want to come back to that as we sort of dive deeper into where the game came from, because I listened to a couple of interviews regarding the history of the game, and I think that thought process is very interesting. And kind of goes against the original intention of the game.
CHELSEY: Hmm.
AMANDA: Hmm.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: To give us a little bit more background, we're talking about this right now as something that has been, like, popular from the last, like, 20 years or so. A little bit longer, maybe like getting closer to 30 years. But this really isn't a new thing, this idea of trying to avoid thinking about a certain thing, right?
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Like, I've always heard of it as the pink elephant paradox.
CHELSEY: Right.
JULIA: Which is the idea of, like— I think the original quote is from Curt Siodmak, City in the Sky, which is, quote, "Tell a man he shouldn't think of a pink elephant and he can't get the beast out of his mind."
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: So the idea of like—
CHELSEY: Yep.
JULIA: —then I say, "Don't think about that." You immediately start thinking about it. It's actually an even older quote from Dostoevsky—
AMANDA: Ooh.
CHELSEY: Oh, cool.
JULIA: —in 1863.
AMANDA: Oh. Julia, the moment you said that, I said, "Of course, it's Russian. Of course, it's Russian."
CHELSEY: Of course, I know.
JULIA: Yes. So the original quote is, "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."
CHELSEY: Absolutely.
JULIA: Absolutely, right?
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: This is a studied phenomenon called Ironic Process Theory. It's called IPT.
CHELSEY: Ooh. It's got a theory name. I love that.
JULIA: It does.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: Basically, it's essentially saying that when an individual intentionally tries to avoid thinking of a certain thought, a paradox occurs, because the attempted avoidance fails, and it even causes the thought to occur more frequently and more intensely.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Okay.
JULIA: It was first studied by a man in 1987 named Daniel Wegner, and he took 34 participants, sat them down for five minutes and told them not to think about a white bear, obviously inspired by Ironic Process Theory. If they did think about the bear, they were told to ring the bell in front of them, and they rang it frequently.
CHELSEY: Constantly.
AMANDA: Could participants hear each other's bells?
JULIA: No. Everyone was in separate rooms.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Got it.
CHELSEY: Good question.
JULIA: Excellent question. He also ran it with a— another factor, where he was like, "Okay, don't think about this. Think about this instead." But it still created the same, like, feedback loop, essentially. So— and this is kind of what the brilliance of The Game is, because much like Wegner's theory, it's this idea of not thinking about a thing actually creates what he calls a rebound effect, in which you think about that thing more than you would have if you simply hadn't been told or reminded about the thing.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Even when you attempt to suppress the thought.
CHELSEY: Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes me think of Ghostbusters when he's supposed to not think of the marshmallow man—
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —and then becomes a gigantic, insane monster.
JULIA: You don't tell someone, be like, "Don't think about anything."
CHELSEY: Right.
JULIA: Immediately, they think about not thinking about anything, you know?
CHELSEY: Exactly.
AMANDA: Yeah, and this often comes up in bigger discussions about like, you know, letting things fade away, about focusing on things that frustrate you. Do you, you know, integrate them into your life? Do you let it go? You know—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: —about quitting things, sobriety. Like, there are so many ways in which this phenomenon, is really something humans deal with all the time.
JULIA: Yeah. And IPT is particularly studied for people with, like, OCD or compulsive thought disorders, or like compulsive eating and stuff like that. Like it is really like a thing that has been pretty studied substantially at this point.
CHELSEY: Yeah. That makes sense.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: I did not make that connection. That's cool.
JULIA: There you go. There you go. But before this was even being studied by someone, before David Wegner sat down and told people don't think about a polar bear, The Game might have existed already.
AMANDA: Okay.
CHELSEY: wow. And what— tell me, again, the year of this polar bear.
JULIA: 1987 was the David Wegner—
CHELSEY: Okay. All right.
JULIA: So we have that claim that I mentioned before of the London man who said that he invented it to annoy everyone in 1996, but we're pretty sure that The Game actually predates that. So my question is, like, how did it get to us?
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: But like anything, the origins are a little hazy. There's not really a written record of it or anything like that. But we do have this idea that The Game might have started as a different mind game that was played by Cambridge students in the mid-1970s.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Oh.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Oh.
JULIA: So—
AMANDA: Oh. Why was my first reaction, "Oh."?
CHELSEY: That's a solid reaction.
AMANDA: What were they getting up to in the '70s at Cambridge?
CHELSEY: Yeah, true. True. Great question.
JULIA: So it's actually quite interesting. There was a— there's a student society at Cambridge called the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society. It was a bunch of nerds in the 1970s from Cambridge.
AMANDA: Is that the thing where, like, Wild and CS Lewis and, like, Tolkien were all smoking the same pipes and stuff?
JULIA: No, because this one was started in the 1970s.
AMANDA: Ah, shit. Okay, okay.
JULIA: It doesn't have a long tradition like a lot of the other Cambridge societies do. But according to one of the members, the club had kind of been inspired by the rise of punk subculture at the time, and they really wanted to use the, like, esthetic and ethos of the movement, and specifically, like, use it as a way of channeling how mathematics were studied and how, like, Game Theory was thought about.
AMANDA: Cool.
JULIA: And so they developed a series of games following that mindset, and one of the games that they began playing was called Finchley Central.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: Now, for people who either are from like the London area or have visited there before, Finchley Central is the name of one of the two stations.
CHELSEY: Ah, okay.
AMANDA: Got it.
JULIA: Now, Finchley Central was a mind game that, again, predated the science fiction society by a few years. It was created at least in 1969, if not before that. But it was outlined for the first time in a publication called Manifold Magazine by Anatole Beck and David Fowler as part of an article that they titled, and this is one of my favorite article titles I've ever heard, A Pandora's Box of Non-games.
AMANDA: Ooh.
JULIA: Sick title.
CHELSEY: Fun box to open.
JULIA: If you'll indulge me, I want to read the introduction to the article about the games, so, quote, "IN THE STUDY OF GAMES, AS IN MANY OTHER INTELLECTUAL PURSUITS, ONE OF THE IMPORTANT PROBLEMS IS TO FIND THE QUESTION." And that's all in caps.
AMANDA: Sure.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: "When the question has been found, the answer may be sought in good time. In Game Theory, there are simple games, like The Matrix Games and very, very complex games. Today, the center of Game Theory is occupied by the theory of cooperative games in which it is not yet known what an answer would be, much less how to find one. We will include below a few simple cooperative games. In addition, we will exhibit some things which are almost certainly games, except that they are so ephemeral, so indistinct that they defy analysis. Unlike chess or go, where the complexity arises from the multiplicity of possible strategies. The difficulty here arises because of the great simplicity."
CHELSEY: Hmm. Okay. Okay.
AMANDA: Okay. It's academic in the most way, which is like—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —what is a poem? What is art? What is a cloud? Like, you know, in real ways that I really jive with, and I love thinking about, like, what is knowledge? What is an answer? What is information? But as soon as you said, "These are, you know, people with—" I'm picturing heavy velvet bell bottoms and long sideburns in the '70s, being like, what is a game, indeed? It's important. It's also funny.
JULIA: Yeah. It's also— yeah, it's also funny. I just love that. So ephemeral, so indistinct.
CHELSEY: Yeah, it's very like academic, smoking shitty '70s weed vibe to me.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: That's the vibe. That's definitely the vibe.
CHELSEY: Uh-huh.
JULIA: So they go on to describe the first game, which, of course, is Finchley Central. And so this is how they describe how to play Finchley Central. Two players alternate naming the stations on the London Underground. The first to say Finchley Central wins. It is clear that the best time to say Finchley Central is exactly before your opponent does. Failing that it is good that he should be considering it. 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."
AMANDA: Ooh.
JULIA: That's the end of the game. That's the end of the game description.
AMANDA: Okay. We have some like, old sportness, right?
CHELSEY: Uh-huh.
AMANDA: Of, like a—
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: —gentleman's game.
CHELSEY: Yes.
JULIA: Yes. So basically, like, all this being said, the objective is to say Finchley Central when, really, there is nothing stopping either of you to say it at any point in playing the game. But it's considered bad sportsmanship, because saying Finchley Central ends the game.
CHELSEY: Wow. Okay, okay. So it's, like, uncouth to actually win the game?
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: To win it too soon.
JULIA: It's like, we want to continue going for as long as possible. So to say Finchley Central too early, you're like, "Oh, you've ruined it."
CHELSEY: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay.
AMANDA: And I must point out a very live topic in the games community, in games discourse, Julia, and I have a Dungeons and Dragons podcast.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Shout out Join the Party. And constantly, on Bluesky, right now in 2025, people are debating like, "Oh, but, like, it sucks to win at the expense of fun. But like—
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: —is it a game if the only point is fun and you're not gonna win? Like, this is really a very live thing that has not gone away in 50 years.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Yeah, and it makes sense. It's a great question and a great thing to think about.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: —because it's absolutely true. It's not fun to win too early.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: You're like, "Oh, all that build up for nothing."
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: You know what I mean?
CHELSEY: Yeah. But then I guess it becomes like, when do you win the game?
JULIA: Exactly.
CHELSEY: Right?
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Or I should say Langley, Langley?
AMANDA: Finchley.
JULIA: Finchley.
CHELSEY: Finchley station. Yeah.
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: That does make me want to publish a version of this about DC Metro stops, because nobody loves the DC Metro more than the users of the DC Metro.
JULIA: That's true.
AMANDA: And so I feel like that would be very popular.
CHELSEY: I think you should do it.
JULIA: Incredible. There is another version of Finchley Central that has a different name. It was popularized on the BBC Radio Show. I'm sorry I Haven't A Clue, which is the title of the BBC Radio Show.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Oh, the Brits.
JULIA: It doesn't really differ all that much in the rules, other than, like, the point of the game is to entertain the audience, rather than, like, actually winning the game.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: So now, we're fast forwarding out of 1969, it's the mid-70s again. Finchley Central is the game that is being played by the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society members. But as the group played it more and more, they began to change and evolve the rules, with one member first suggesting that you could win not just by saying Finchley Central first, but by thinking it first.
CHELSEY: Ooh. Okay.
JULIA: And then iterating further, they began to turn the game on its head, saying, "You actually didn't win. You instead lost by thinking Finchley Central first." Therefore, losing the game the moment you thought about the winning move of the game.
CHELSEY: Okay, so we've moved from—
AMANDA: Okay.
CHELSEY: —from smoking weed to taking acid in the Cambridge Society.
JULIA: Yes. Yep.
CHELSEY: Okay, all right.
JULIA: So the thought process is as, like, membership kind of grew and people graduate and stuff like that, they passed down this variation of the game to new generations of different members.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: But eventually— and they're not sure exactly when— one of the members actually blamed one of the other members and the guy's like, "I don't remember that at all." But it eventually broke containment from the club, and we assume it transformed into The Game. And Chelsey, I want to go back to what you said earlier about— you're like, "I don't think the game sounds fun, right?" Like, if you're constantly trying to figure out how to make other people lose, you're not really winning.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Like, what's the point? And in an interview with one of the, like, original members of the Science Fiction Society, the American interviewer was like, "So, like, if you win—" and the guy's like, "No, there's no winning. That's what's funny about the game. That's the point of the game is no one wins. It's only losing."
CHELSEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JULIA: So I think it is a very, like, almost weird British wit idea—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —that, like, there is never any winning, and it's really the American mindset of like, "But how do I succeed? How do I win?"
CHELSEY: Interesting.
JULIA: You know?
CHELSEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do I do this if I can't become the best at it—
JULIA: Exactly.
CHELSEY: —and, like, become a billionaire?
AMANDA: The British punk subculture also makes a lot of sense—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —to me here, because as you're describing it, Julia, I'm like, "Oh, that's my definition of cool."
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: Is not trying, not caring, and just being effortless. And then from the outside, I want and aspire to it so bad, and I can't achieve it definitionally, because I care.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: And so I just— I love that it's like, "Hmm, yeah. Whatever. Okay, like, the only winning is not to care." And I'm like, "But I care so much."
JULIA: Yes. Yes.
CHELSEY: Yeah, that's real.
JULIA: I think that's the big philosophical difference between us.
CHELSEY: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JULIA: So part of the transformation from Finchley Central to The Game, this is where it becomes the murkiest. We really don't have any sort of written record between the, like, late '70s to the 1996 man claiming that he invented The Game, right? And I think that part of the reason that Finchley Central transformed into The Game has to do with it breaking containment, I'd like to call it, and escaping outside of Cambridge and then the Greater London area.
CHELSEY: Hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: So, again, remember, you lost Finchley Central because you thought of Finchley Central. But Finchley Central doesn't mean much to someone who, let's say, like in the example of Jonty Haywood, for example, is from Cornwall.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Or if you're from Ireland, or eventually— as we know it will eventually get across the pond, in the United States. Like Finchley Central doesn't mean anything for two girls from Long Island. You know what I mean?
CHELSEY: Right. Yep. Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: No. But if you said Penn Station, I'd be like, "Shit," because I think of train stations, and that comes to mind for me very quickly—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: —obviously.
JULIA: And that's like the— that's why the game was so centralized at first. But I think it becomes decentralized because you need a way to, like, make it more universal. Like, you're no longer, like, riding on the tube. You see Finchley Central, and you're like, "Ah, shit, I lost." You need something that is easy to think about in the day-to-day. And that universality is why I think The Game becomes the game, and why it becomes so popular so quickly, and why it spreads so quickly.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Yeah, yep.
JULIA: So I think that is, like, a really interesting way to, like, see where it came from and how it had to change in order to become this thing that is, according to you, lostthegame.com, a worldwide phenomenon.
CHELSEY: And I like this— kind of, like, changing and occurring in the '90s, because it almost reminds me of, like, Scream, the movie.
JULIA: Hmm.
CHELSEY: Where it's like the movie within the movie, it becomes really meta, like no longer you're thinking about something outside the game, you can't think of the game, which, to me, is very '90s.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Self-awareness culture.
JULIA: Oh, yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: It's very post-modern. It's not just—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: —for playing the game, but we are so, you know, evolved, and alert, and aware that we can comment on the fact that we know The Game. And again, I'm saying it with a little bit of distaste, but a lot of loving it, because I love that shit. I read Thomas Pynchon. Like, come on.
CHELSEY: Of course, yeah.
JULIA: Now, I didn't mean to, like, admonish you for thinking like, "Oh, how do I win the game?" Like, I didn't want to be like, "Oh, Chelsey, you have a real American mindset about that kind of thing."
CHELSEY: It's okay. You can admonish me.
JULIA: But that is like a general question that, like, people have asked, especially as it went from Finchley Central to The Game. So the question of, how do you win the game? The answer, really, is, you don't, but there are variations of the game. Rather than it being that kind of never ending, you're constantly doing it until the day you die, and Amanda's gonna put it on her tombstone style. There are some people who, like, would say, won the argument, that you are winning the game simply by temporarily forgetting about the game, in which case the victory does feel kind of hollow.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Because you're like, "Wait, I forgot about the thing— so I was winning that whole time, but I forgot that I was winning."
CHELSEY: I can't process that I am winning. So am I really winning?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: I've also heard that there is a additional alternate rule to the three that I listed at the beginning of this episode, in which a winner is, albeit temporarily achieved. So this additional rule states that when someone declares that they have thought about the game and therefore lost the game, there is a temporary immunity period where other people can think about the game without necessarily losing, which then makes all of the other people around the person who announced that they lost, winners.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Okay.
JULIA: But, again, I would say it is considered a controversial rule—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —among the players of the game.
CHELSEY: Among the purists, yeah.
JULIA: Among the purists, yes, for sure.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: But also, like, there is something to be said about the universal spirit of someone in a classroom saying, "I just lost the game." Everyone groaning and saying, "I just lost the game." You know what I mean?
CHELSEY: I do like that, yeah. That's probably very annoying for teachers.
JULIA: Oh, yes.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: It must be. Julia, that also reminds me of my knee jerk reaction to you bringing up social media in the beginning of this episode, which, you know, again, we graduated high school by the time Twitter was kind of mainstreaming, so it wasn't quite as present for us. We certainly had Facebook, not Instagram yet, and Twitter was kind of gaining popularity among the more online of us.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: But I find it against the spirit of the game to use social media. To me, the point of it is the, like, you know, crossing of just sort of happenstance with people that are around you. And to me, pranking someone, putting it on a billboard, you know, doing anything at scale kind of subverts the fun of it. But—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —maybe that's just like an analog and, you know, un-updated attitude of mine.
JULIA: Well, that's also really interesting, Amanda, because one of the popular types of videos, I'll say, like a video meme, perhaps, was like elaborate pranks in order to make someone lose the game.
CHELSEY: Okay. That's fun.
AMANDA: Ah, the Rickrolling phenomenon, yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Exactly.
CHELSEY: I was gonna say very Rickroll, yeah.
JULIA: Doing like a Rube Goldberg sort of machine that, like, you watch the whole video, it's like five minutes long. And then at the end, like a scroll on scrolls, and it just says, "You lost the game."
CHELSEY: That's funny.
AMANDA: See, I like that. I'm— that pisses me off, but I— that's funny.
CHELSEY: That's funny.
AMANDA: So maybe what I want is effort.
JULIA: Okay.
CHELSEY: Yeah, creativity.
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah.
JULIA: Do you blame the Belfast man who won that contest and decided he's like, "I'm gonna make everyone lose in Belfast."?
AMANDA: You know, no, I admire the cheek. So I'm— this is good. I'm unpacking a lot of contradictions in myself. Yeah.
JULIA: That's good.
CHELSEY: There we go. It's good.
JULIA: I like that. I like that.
CHELSEY: This is what the show is for, yeah.
JULIA: So we've kind of made allusions to the fact that the game goes on forever until we all die in the heat death of the universe.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Not necessarily true. There were a couple of supposed, proposed endings, right?
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: So one of the most prevalent ones that I've seen is that the game will end when the Prime Minister of the UK announces on TV, mind you, that the game is up.
CHELSEY: Wow. Okay.
AMANDA: Oh.
CHELSEY: Okay.
JULIA: And honestly, we haven't had a true millennial as Prime Minister yet in the UK, I don't think.
CHELSEY: Hmm. Uh-uh.
AMANDA: No. Oh, oh, God. I just remember that millennials would be president one day. Oh, boy. Okay.
CHELSEY: It's too much pressure.
JULIA: But when we do, when we do, they have the opportunity to do something very funny.
CHELSEY: Uh-huh.
JULIA: A couple of other ones from early sources said that if the Queen of England announced it, the game would end.
AMANDA: Sure.
CHELSEY: She'll never do it.
JULIA: Well, she can't now.
AMANDA: She can't now.
JULIA: Also, if the pope announced it—
AMANDA: Uh-huh.
JULIA: —that's another option.
CHELSEY: I could see him doing it.
JULIA: I was gonna say Pope Francis—
AMANDA: He could do it.
JULIA: —would be the Pope to do it.
CHELSEY: I could see it, yeah.
AMANDA: Pope Francis would be like, "This is causing discord among our youth."
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: "Like, let's get this over with. I'm gonna say it in Spanish, then Latin, then English. It's over."
CHELSEY: The Catholic Church is just bleeding members any way we can.
JULIA: I think if Pope Francis had been Pope in 2009, he would have done this.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: He might have done it, yeah. He was very online.
CHELSEY: Instead of that vampire we had. What was his name?
AMANDA: Benedict, yeah.
JULIA: Yeah, Benedict the 14th, I think.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Scary.
JULIA: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: And then there was also one last one, because, you know, the internet, it's the late 2000s, it's the early 2010s everyone was obsessed with Chuck Norris. So they said only Chuck Norris could end the game.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: Hmm.
CHELSEY: That wasn't like our finest time in millennial culture, the Chuck Norris era.
JULIA: No. No. Not really.
AMANDA: No. I feel like that coincided with, or maybe it was on the tail end of the bacon era.
JULIA: Oh, yeah.
CHELSEY: Hmm.
AMANDA: Which I know is partially, you know, from the pork lobby to, like, make us buy otherwise undesirable pork products to, like, white Americans, like pork belly.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Hmm.
AMANDA: But I just had an image of Chuck Norris like karate chopping through a piece of slab bacon, and on the slab bacon is written— or maybe perhaps tattooed, "I just lost the game."
JULIA: Wow.
CHELSEY: Perfect. And he's got a little finger mustache, tattoo.
JULIA: Of course, naturally, naturally.
CHELSEY: More after this.
AMANDA: Hey, everybody. It's Amanda. Welcome to the refill. So glad you're here. And hey, if you came over from American Hysteria, we're so glad to have you. Welcome to Spirits, where we call our listeners, the ConSpiriters, but in like, a fun, queer, cool way, and not the terrible way. Welcome to the part of the show where we tell you about what's going on with us, ads, welcoming our patrons, all the good stuff that you need to know. Which, first of all, if you live in Portland, Oregon, you should come see us live on March 23rd. It's gonna be so much fun. Julia and I cannot wait to bring you all kinds of Pacific Northwest weirdness. So listen, I know it is a doable drive from Seattle. I know there's some of you in Oregon who want to come through outside the Portland area, so join us, go to spiritspodcast.com/live to get your tickets now. And by the way, if you are a Conspiriter who lives in or around New York City, you can also come say hi to me and Julia at a craft cocktail pop-up that we are hosting for Join the Party, the Dungeons & Dragons podcast that we are players on, on February 20th. That is free to attend. It's in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, right by the Multitude Studio. And if you want, you can buy an incredible cocktail or mocktail by listener Nick. So it's going to be fabulous. Both links in the description, come through. We would also love to welcome our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Mika, Marisa, and Milo. Three M's right in a row. If y'all are triplets, then I highly appreciate your coordination in all joining the Patreon on— in the same, like, 36 hours. So thank you so much. You now have access to things like a monthly extra bonus urban legends episode, you get behind the scenes notes and printable recipe cards for both cocktails and mocktails with every dang episode, and many, many more. We have going on nine years of bonus content on the Patreon that you can get if you join at patreon.com/spiritspodcast. And thank you especially to our supporting producer-level patrons, Uhleeseeuh, Anne, Hannah, Jane, Lily, Matthew, Rikoelike, Captain Jonathan MAL-uh-kye Cosmos, Scott, Wil and AE (Ah), as well as our legend-level patrons, Audra, Bex, Chibi Yokai, Michael, Morgan H., Sarah, and Bea Me Up Scotty. Now this week, I typically recommend here, like a book or a song or game or something I've been enjoying, I'm going to recommend you subscribe to American Hysteria. If as a Spirits listener, you have not yet listened to the show, I have a great, great news for you, which is, it's awesome. You're gonna love what Chelsey does with the show. They edit so well. They're such a good performer and speaker. All the topics are stuff that you are going to love. So go on over, subscribe to American Hysteria. And hey, by the way, if you like this episode, it would be super helpful to us if you would text a friend about it. If you have craved a Spirits Julia research deep dive into a topic that's more around contemporary urban legends and folklore practices, this is a really great starting point. So text a friend, say, "Hey, listen to this episode. You're gonna love it. Remember The Game? If you haven't, now you will." And text them that link. By the way, as always, we have transcripts for all episodes at spiritspodcast.com about 48 hours after the episode comes out. And hey, tons going on over at Multitude, the podcast collective that we are a founding member of. And let me tell you a little bit about the newest show to join us, it's called Tiny Matters. It is co-hosted by scientists Sam Jones and Deboki Chakravarti, and it is all about genes, microbes, and other tiny things that have a big impact on our world. Deboki and Sam take apart complex and sometimes contentious topics in science to rebuild your understanding. They post fabulous reels on social media, and they cover everything from deadly diseases to ancient sewers, to forensic toxicology. You are going to love learning about the messiness and reality of science in the past, present, and future. So go on over, subscribe to Tiny Matters in your podcast app, or check out Tiny Matters online at the link in the description.
BRYAN: Hi, my name is Bryan Lowder, and I'm one of the hosts of Outward, Slate's LGBTQ podcast, where we lead a whip-smart queer salon each week with guests like Raquel Willis and Bob the Drag Queen. It's the inclusive space that we deserve. You'll hear discussions on topics like lesbian subtext and true detective and how trademark law is helping queer brands reclaim derogatory language. Join us for conversations on queer culture and politics each week, and follow Outward now wherever you listen.
CHELSEY: And now back to the show.
JULIA: So my final point is, there has been an argument that the game has already ended.
CHELSEY: Hmm.
JULIA: So in a 2008 web comment from XKCD, you are probably familiar with the art, if not the web comic itself, in a single, very simple panel titled, Anti-Mindvirus, it just reads, "You have won the game. It's okay. You're free."
CHELSEY: Wow.
JULIA: I'm gonna share it real quick with you guys, just so you can see it.
CHELSEY: Yeah, let me see this.
JULIA: But it is hilarious.
CHELSEY: Wow.
JULIA: Wow.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Just simple.
CHELSEY: Just really simple. Yep, I love that.
JULIA: They're like, "Be free, friends. Be free from the game."
CHELSEY: I'm sure it didn't work. Yeah.
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: Classic XKCD from that era as well. That's like the whole page of the internet in many households in, you know, the aughts and early 20-teens.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah, for sure. Was this like a Tumblr thing?
JULIA: Yeah. I would say Tumblr definitely liked The Game.
CHELSEY: Okay, yeah.
JULIA: Tumblr was very into The Game at the time.
CHELSEY: I missed—
JULIA: I'm sure if you searched Tumblr still, you'd still find posts about The Game.
CHELSEY: Yeah, I've been admonished quite a few times by people being like, "You missed something that happened on Tumblr in your research or your presentation or your conversation." And it really is just like, entirely missed by me. Don't know if it was age or just— I wasn't such an internet person until later on.
JULIA: You know what the thing is with Tumblr as well? Is, like, you had to be there because no one was writing about what was going on, on Tumblr outside of Tumblr.
CHELSEY: Yeah. That makes sense.
JULIA: It's almost like we're talking about, like, what this science fiction society in Cambridge was doing. No one was writing down the shit that they were doing at the pub on, like, Tuesdays, you know?
CHELSEY: Right, right.
AMANDA: Until they did, yeah.
JULIA: And while we can go back to what was going on in 2008 Tumblr, it's hard to research, you know?
CHELSEY: Sure.
JULIA: It's hard to find it.
CHELSEY: It is, I agree. Thank you.
JULIA: Yeah, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. You weren't there, Chelsey. You weren't there.
CHELSEY: Thank you, thank you.
JULIA: You weren't on the front lines. So all this to say is, if we are sticking to the strictest form of the rules laid out for The Game, we are still all continuously playing the game.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And at the end of the day, the real winning is kind of completely forgetting that the game exists, which I— so therefore, I've ruined it for most of your audience. But when I texted my husband—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: —and he told me he had no idea what I was talking about, there was this, like, moment of like clarity, a moment of like, "Ahhh," like the angels opened up, where I was like, "Damn, did he really permanently just win the game? Did my husband permanently win the game?"
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And I like to think that he did, and he won't remember that I told him what The Game was, and forever will be the winner and the champion.
CHELSEY: Well, bless his heart.
JULIA: Bless his heart. He tried so hard. Now, I love The Game because I think that it is such an excellent example of something that we often talk about on Spirits regarding urban legends, something that you talk about on your show all the time, but this idea of, like, the word of mouth network, going back to the Network of Cousins, all of these things that kids in the '80s and the '90s and the early aughts all knew about before the internet was really a thing. And Amanda, I know you did a little research on some fun options and fun examples of, like, other stuff besides The Game that somehow we all knew about in 2003, you know?
AMANDA: Absolutely. And I would love to run through a list of the ones that I found most interesting and see what made it to the West Coast.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: What made it for us, and what perhaps the listeners of this podcast grew up with that— to them, is like, "Oh my God, you haven't heard of whatever? Like, whose cousins are you?"
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Whose cousins are you is such an insult. I like that.
AMANDA: Yeah. Whose cousin is that? Yeah, exactly.
CHELSEY: I've always wanted to have a band called The Cool Cousin from California.
JULIA: Oh, that's a great one.
CHELSEY: Thank you.
AMANDA: I think that's also a strong candidate for my gender.
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
JULIA: Cool Cousin from California is a good gender description, I will say.
CHELSEY: That is peak gender, yeah.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: Yeah. So growing up in school, Chelsey, give me a quick yes or no, did you have the MASH game with a fortune teller?
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah, of course.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Classic.
CHELSEY: Constant, never-ending game of MASH, yeah.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Yeah. And this is— you are going to figure out who you're going to marry, how many kids you're going to have, where you're going to live, and what your career is like. There's different variations from all over the world, going back many, many decades, with and without the sort of, like, fortune catcher. You can also do it in a, like, grid, essentially, with pencil and paper.
CHELSEY: That was more what we did.
JULIA: I've also seen a spiral, you know?
CHELSEY: Yeah. We did more of the spiral for MASH. Like, I think of—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —MASH as that, and then I think of the fortune teller. I don't remember what we wrote on the fortune teller. Maybe it was a— just a variation of that, but—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —I was always making those fortune tellers.
AMANDA: It was about, like, what your future is going to be—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: —and, you know, there's some random chance of—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —figuring it out.
CHELSEY: Yeah. And you wrote, like, boy names from your class.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: That's a big secret. Yeah, okay. Yeah.
AMANDA: Exactly. There are all kinds of clapping games. I put into Google, Miss Mary Mack, and there are so many threads on Reddit and elsewhere. I did a deep dive in the Gen X culture sub reddit.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: That's a scary place. Where, you know, you were doing all kinds of clapping games, having different rhymes. Some of them quite dark, some of them a little bit raunchy. Some of them clearly, like, Victorian in origin.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Which ones were popular with you growing up?
CHELSEY: Definitely Miss Susie Had A Steamboat. Steamboat Had A Bell.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah, I remember this one. That one was pretty inappropriate at times.
AMANDA: Yes.
CHELSEY: She was wearing a 40-acre bra, is something I remember—
JULIA: Whoa.
CHELSEY: —which was really odd.
JULIA: Oh, I don't remember that one as one of the originals, for us doing it, at least, so that's very cool.
CHELSEY: But you had that rhyme structure of Miss Susie Had—
JULIA: Oh, yeah.
CHELSEY: —A steam boat, okay.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Really, really random. That would be another fun episode to figure that shit out.
JULIA: That would be cool.
CHELSEY: And then we had Quack Diddly Oso. Do you remember this game?
JULIA: I don't think I've ever heard of that one.
AMANDA: No.
CHELSEY: This was so fun. It was everybody stood in a circle, and like hand over hand, not holding hands, but like flat hand on flat hand. And then you'd clap their hand, and they'd clap the next hand in a circle.
AMANDA: Yes.
CHELSEY: And you would sing this little song. And then when you got to the end of the song, you go,"1, 2, 3, 4," and then the goal, if you were the slapper on four, would be to hit the person's hand. And then the goal—
JULIA: Okay.
CHELSEY: —if you were about to get slapped, is to move your hand away. And if you—
JULIA: Ah.
CHELSEY: —get slapped, you're out. Get smaller and smaller. It's a very fun game, played it a lot.
JULIA: It's like musical chairs, but also the— just like the hand-slapping game, where you—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: —someone places their hand over the other, and the goal is to hit the person's hand.
CHELSEY: Yeah. Totally similar.
JULIA: Interesting.
CHELSEY: Just with, like, a little song, and you could do it with a bunch of people.
JULIA: That's fascinating.
CHELSEY: Which isn't the same— you know, it's not quite the same thing as what we're talking about with, like, kind of these patty cake-like games, but—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: But, yeah, those were really the two most popular clapping games or, like, longtime rhyme games, where you have to remember—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —the whole big, long rhyme.
JULIA: Yes.
AMANDA: Exactly. And there are jump rope and double Dutch rhymes, like all kinds of things that you can do just rhythmically to a routine. There was also just what I called, like excuses to touch each other.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: Which I don't mean it like that, but what I do mean is like the, you know, the crack an egg on your head and run, you know—
CHELSEY: Hmm.
AMANDA: Eggs down your back.
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: The shivers. Just like all of them had little songs. And to me, excuses to figure out our boundaries as we're, you know, like having platonic intimacy with other friends.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Light as a feather, stiff as a board, you know?
AMANDA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: That kind of thing.
CHELSEY: Especially important if you're a little queer kid.
AMANDA: As we all were.
CHELSEY: Who just wants to hang out with your friends and—
AMANDA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: It'd be like, "Sleepover? Sounds dangerous, but I'm in."
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Yeah. And then there are all of the things that cross over with Satanic Panic and other kinds of moral panics—
JULIA: Ooh. Ding, ding, ding.
AMANDA: Where we have our parents thinking that emoticons like ASCii emoticons before we had emoji. For anyone who's younger, we had to use things like, you know, the equal sign, the dash, parentheses, brackets, colons to make faces.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: And people really thought that emoticons were codes to buy drugs. And, of course, really for Julia's and my particular era, that text, speak, chat, speak, leetspeak, and other kinds of texting abbreviations. I just remember so vividly, like charts on the local news, like ABC7—
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: —Eyewitness, you know, of like, what your kid means when they're setting up a sex rendezvous with, like, the, "You home? Want to go to third base, you know, tonight?" text.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Which, like, they— we make fun of all the time, still, on the internet. Like, it's so frequently that you're like, "Are— is your child, like, texting about—" and then someone will replace it with, like, Lord of the Rings.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Or something like that.
CHELSEY: Yeah. And then they— yeah, they, like, would make up all of the abbreviations, and what they actually meant. Yeah.
JULIA: Yeah. Like, LOL means not laughing out loud, something very silly.
AMANDA: My grandma uses it for lots of love.
CHELSEY: Yeah. But I mean, people— like, they would take it and make it, like, the most lurid, gross thing.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: And it's like stop doing this.
JULIA: Please stop.
AMANDA: No 12-year old is thinking this.
CHELSEY: No. What's wrong with you?
AMANDA: This is before we can access porn that easy, too.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Like we didn't know about this stuff.
JULIA: Yeah, yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah, it sounds like an adult problem. Yeah, really weird.
AMANDA: Seriously.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: I wish I knew that retort when I was young. But that— the chat speak, leetspeak, led me down a beautiful rabbit hole of written codes that freaked parents out.
JULIA: Ooh.
AMANDA: There are some in different languages. So in Japanese, there's the Henohenomoheji, which is a face drawn by Japanese school children using hiragana characters in the Edo period.
JULIA: Whoa.
AMANDA: The shit is old. Let me send this link to you right now.
CHELSEY: Okay, all right.
JULIA: Look at him. Oh, he's a little guy.
CHELSEY: He's not scary.
AMANDA: So these are seven hiragana characters, and the first two are the eyebrows and the eyes, et cetera. And it usually symbolizes, like a— sort of just a person's face, like the equivalent of, like, a stick figure.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: Like, this is an Edo period, just like stick figure guy that you make out of letters.
CHELSEY: Right.
JULIA: And then it's still, like, used as graffiti today, which is kind of really cool. I love that.
AMANDA: Oh, you'll see it all over. This, in turn, led me to a French version, Tête à Toto.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: Which is a math equation. Now, I don't know why the French went in specifically a math direction, but you know this is a real meme, because there are all kinds of variations.
JULIA: Uh-huh.
CHELSEY: I like this one.
AMANDA: So this also has a rhyme. So you draw this, you're basically adding together zeros, and then you make it in a bigger zero with an equal sign. And it looks kind of like a skull with glasses on and, like, a weird mouth and mouth's an equal sign.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: But you recite, "Zéro plus zéro égale la tête à toto." Zero plus zero equals the head of Toto. Toto's head.
CHELSEY: Really basic, yeah. Really straightforward.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: And so Toto is a figure in France. This is like saying, "Oh, Johnny Appleseed." Like, whatever. Like it's a thing you can refer to. Toto is like a person. I don't find it particularly fun, but I think the fact that you can write down different characters, of numbers only, of zeros—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —a plus and an equal sign yielding a face.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: Is kind of mind-blowing for a kid.
CHELSEY: It is.
JULIA: It's real boobs on a calculator. Let's be honest.
AMANDA: It is very boobs on a calculator. And, Julia, just the same era, we were learning to write boobs on a calculator, and then saying, "This is giving me feelings that nobody wants me to unpack." We were also drawing Satanic S's on our binders.
CHELSEY: Of course.
JULIA: Yes.
CHELSEY: The Stussy S.
AMANDA: Now, Chelsey, what is your descriptor of this S? You know what I'm talking about when I say it.
CHELSEY: Yeah, of course. Fuck yeah. It's three lines straight up and down, and then three lines directly below it. Then you do a little triangle on the top. You do a little triangle on the bottom.
AMANDA: Yep.
CHELSEY: Then you cross it. You know, and then you'd mess it up sometimes, and you get it backwards, and you'd be so mad.
AMANDA: Like, "Ah, shit."
CHELSEY: And you'd erase it. But I always drew too hard, so it looked like shit afterwards.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: Yeah, yeah. I'd scribble.
CHELSEY: But that's— yeah. It was everywhere. And every single listener of this show, I almost guarantee, knows what we're talking about, if they are of the millennial generation.
JULIA: For sure.
AMANDA: Exactly. And this— you know, you said you described it as the Stussy S, right?
CHELSEY: Yeah, which I think is a name that was much, like very recently given to it, like upon—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —reflection of like, what were we doing? What was that? There's no academic literature to draw from here.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: There is, in fact, some literature to draw from.
CHELSEY: Okay. Uh-huh.
AMANDA: Mostly forum posts and articles, but I did my darndest to do a deep dive on what I call the Cool S, what people call the universal S, the Stussy S, or the Pointy S.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Lots of ways that this drawing— which, again, is like the drawing itself, you're like, "Oh, I know what that means." But just the fact of, like, making lines and then they all connect. Like it is pretty cool. And you don't see where it's going. And the first time someone shows you, you're like, "My mind has been blown. I am eight."
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Yes.
AMANDA: And it's incredible. Now, people did originally think, and the people who think this really think it with full conviction, that this is from the streetwear brand Stussy, which started in California 1980 and happily, a journalist, Julian Morgans researched this for a story in Vice in 2016, and talked with someone who worked with the guy, Sean Stussy in 1985.
CHELSEY: Ooh, okay.
AMANDA: And was like, "Hey, people keep saying this. I've been drawing this S my whole life, too. It predates Stussy. It's not about us." The logo looks a little bit like it, so that's why people thought originally, "Oh, well, maybe it's like the streetwear thing."
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: I'm looking at.
AMANDA: Please.
CHELSEY: I'm gonna compare.
JULIA: I also— I loved the Cool S when I was a kid, only because I have like, a solid S in my last name. So I was, like, every time I write my last name, I'm gonna include the cool S.
CHELSEY: I'm sorry, this S does not look like it at all, unless you--
JULIA: I know.
AMANDA: It doesn't look like it at all.
CHELSEY: No, because it's like—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Stussy, like, just like the scribble, right?
AMANDA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Yeah. No, it doesn't look like it at all. It's bullshit.
AMANDA: Nope.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: I'm also glad you said that first, because I was like, "Stussy?" I don't know how this is pronounced, so—
CHELSEY: I'm also not certain at all, but that's what popped into my head.
AMANDA: Every time, inevitably, the Cool S is mentioned on, again, Reddit, in a comment thread, anywhere on the internet. Somebody will say, "No, actually, it's for Superman."
CHELSEY: Oh, my God.
AMANDA: This is the one I remember hearing the most.
CHELSEY: Get real.
AMANDA: Which is that people were like, "Oh, no, no. That was the original Superman logo." Happily, journalist Julian Morgans also reached out to DC and they said, "No."
CHELSEY: No. Absolutely not, yeah.
AMANDA: There is no logo that matches this. It's very pointy. It's not giving like, you know, 1940s like Superman origins. But people, of course, as this is a phenomenon rising popularity in the '80s and '90s, found a way to tie Satan to it. They, of course, said that it was an S for Satan worship. That's why it was so spiky.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: That's why it was like revealed over time. It's about how the devil can draw you—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —in and individual actions that you do. You might not think that taking a hit of weed, for example, Amanda, when she was 14, will lead you down a path to terrible, crippling addiction, but—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: —you know, it will. And so it was really that like, "Oh, kids are using this to show each other they love Satan," was because Satan starts with an S.
JULIA: Yeah, of course. Of course. I also saw several people say, like, back in the day that their school banned the Cool S—
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: —because they thought it was a gang sign. And they were like, "Oh, well, we can't have the Bloods or the Crips—"
CHELSEY: Yep.
JULIA: "—in our schools."
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
JULIA: And they're like, "That has nothing to do with anything about this."
CHELSEY: Exactly concurrent panics happening there with gangs and Satan.
AMANDA: Exactly, guys. Don't worry. People thought it was a gang sign in LA, the Soldados. And people were like, "No, we have signs."
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: "This is not one of them."
CHELSEY: This is not that.
JULIA: This is not one of them.
CHELSEY: Do you think we have time to draw that?
AMANDA: No. They sure don't. Other people have speculated that it might have been originally based on the Suzuki logo before that was as common of a brand in the US. Again, the Suzuki logo was simply a bit of a modular S.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: None of this is really, like, straight up the middle Styx as well, the band. People were like, "Oh, maybe related to that." But in most cases, you ask the person, they're like, "No, it's— I just— I made a logo."
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: Like an S can be drawn differently.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: So you might think that that is as far back as things reach, but people get lost in the sauce.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: And so I have personally seen three or four different people who claim that they have found the earliest version of the Universal or Cool S.
JULIA: Okay.
AMANDA: One is 1897, a book on typography—
CHELSEY: Whoa.
AMANDA: —which has, again, simply a pointy S in it, as we're experimenting with typeface.
CHELSEY: Is— does it look like the S, the Cool S?
AMANDA: It does not, but I can send—
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: —you— hang on, I have a screenshot of this.
JULIA: People love claiming shit.
CHELSEY: I mean, me too.
JULIA: Yeah. Well, listen, they're like, "This is the same thing."
CHELSEY: It's what we do as urban legend— as like folklorists, you know?
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: We're just like, "Maybe it's that. Maybe that's connected."
JULIA: I just love when people are like, "This is the same thing." And you look at it, you're like, "There's nothing remotely similar to what you're describing here."
CHELSEY: No. Yeah.
AMANDA: So Chelsey, that typeface book was uncovered by a wonderful YouTuber, Let Me Know, who published a very widely viewed video in 2020 on the origins of the cool S.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Which I loved, and that was as far back as they got. But others have uncovered a painting called The Ambassador by Hans Holbein.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: It is from 1553.
JULIA: What?
CHELSEY: Ooh.
AMANDA: And I just want to get a quick vote here, a quick little poll.
JULIA: Okay.
AMANDA: Do we think this looks like the Cool S?
CHELSEY: Okay. Let's see.
AMANDA: And specifically, we're looking— so this depicts two men standing in, like, academic finery with some, like, tools and globes between them, a very pretty green backdrop. And then in between the men, they have just like cuntally covered their work bench with, like, a little tapestry.
CHELSEY: Oh.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: And next to that man's left hand, there is an S.
CHELSEY: I see it. Hold on, I'm trying to zoom, I'm trying to zoom.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: It seemed pretty far. Yeah.
JULIA: What I like about this is it's very clearly a painting of, like, cross stitch embroidery.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: So it is modular in the sense that it is made out of squares.
AMANDA: Yes.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm. Yeah.
JULIA: But it has too much space in the curves of the S's. Do you know what I mean?
CHELSEY: Yeah. I'd say it was— it's an extreme reach.
JULIA: Uh-hmm. Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: To call that the Stussy S.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: I love this painting, though.
JULIA: That's a great painting.
AMANDA: The painting is adorable.
CHELSEY: 1500s paintings are so scary, and weird, and incredible.
AMANDA: It strikes me as a particularly trans-masculine urge to, like, put on finery and hang out with your boys.
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: So I would just love to offer that to anyone for whom that resonates. But yeah, this is clearly, Julia, just a needlepoint S.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: There is only one connecting bridge. There are no, like, borders of the middle part of the S, which, to me—
JULIA: Right.
AMANDA: —is really necessary.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: And so I thought like, "Okay, whatever. That's a stretch." But there's an even older stretch, which is a incredible legacy of, of course, Islamic art.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: Specifically in mosaic and tile, where, famously, you, you know, are not able to depict the visage of God. And so you get really fucking creative with patterns. And so I would love to offer you, this is tile work of a mosque from 1356, and that is—
CHELSEY: Wow.
AMANDA: —the actual oldest one I could find.
JULIA: Okay.
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: So we're looking here at this border of stylized S's in sort of, like, relief white tile against a green outside.
JULIA: Interesting.
CHELSEY: This one definitely is hitting closer for me.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: You know?
JULIA: It feels closer, for sure.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: But I still like— there's something about the, like, distinctness of the Cool S that it is, like, so squished together. So it is defined by only the single line that creates the border. You know what I mean?
CHELSEY: Everything touches everything else.
JULIA: Everything touches everything, yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah. Uh-hmm.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: Julia, I'm so glad you brought up how the Cool S is legally distinct from other S's, because—
JULIA: Oh, yeah?
AMANDA: —as everything ends in a capitalist hellscape, which I think is the appropriate note to close this episode on, a guy has, in fact, trademarked the Cool S and is selling officially licensed keychains, carabiners of the Cool S, which is a good application of the Cool S, I have to say.
JULIA: Okay.
AMANDA: From his patent application, let me send you an image of that.
CHELSEY: Is he suing people?
AMANDA: Not yet.
CHELSEY: All right.
AMANDA: But he could.
JULIA: Not yet.
CHELSEY: Okay, we'll see.
JULIA: Amanda, I think I did also see this one, and I think that he said in an interview, he's like, "I don't want to sue anyone." I was like, "Hmm, that doesn't mean you won't, though."
AMANDA: I have a little more on him. Yeah, give me just one second.
JULIA: Okay, good. Oh, look at the paper clip.
CHELSEY: Yep.
AMANDA: Yes. Julia, excellent. He is, in fact, using a— an S-shaped paper clip on his US patent for— again, typically, a US patent will then display like a very intricate diagram of a cell, or a circuit, or like a loom.
CHELSEY: Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: And in this case, it is simply an S that's drawn, which is very funny. It's also wider than the S's I remember drawing.
JULIA: Interesting.
AMANDA: I liked a like skinny, narrow, tall S.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: Yeah, I think I did, too. Whatever— what felt the most challenging, kind of.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: It did. This man is named Mark May. He filed a trademark on the Cool S in 2020. He claims it took years of litigation after buying the patent— or the trademark, excuse me, off of a college student who was trying to use it as a logo for a line of sensitive fabrics for patients in a healthcare setting.
CHELSEY: Oh.
JULIA: Oh. See, that's kind of nice.
AMANDA: And the student said, "Okay." And the undisclosed sum was paid for the trademark. So this man now has a business that I don't necessarily want to promote, but the Instagram handle does have the trademark symbol in the name, so like to really make you know that it's trademarked. In theory, he could sue anyone else who does, says he doesn't want to, but he might. I just thought it was incredibly, again, just poetic in a way—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: —that few things can be, that the trademark text reads, "The mark consists of geometric S shape made up of incomplete triangles, incomplete squares, and one incomplete quadrilateral in the center of the shape."
JULIA: Now, Amanda, can I point out the thing that pisses me off the most about this image here?
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: Now ,there is a thing there that says, "First use,: and then it's redacted.
AMANDA: Yes.
JULIA: And I want to know what he's claiming the first use was.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: I would also like to know. There are tons of people on Etsy. If you search Cool S on Etsy, you get over a 1,000 things, including a T-shirt that says "Too cool for Satan," using the Cool S as an S in Satan, which I just think is hilarious.
JULIA: Sick. Uh-hmm.
AMANDA: My only gripe is that the sizes get more expensive as you go up.
JULIA: Oh.
AMANDA: Which I think is kind of bullshit.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah, great.
AMANDA: But, yeah, otherwise I would wear that.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: No notes.
JULIA: That's— damn. Damn, dude.
CHELSEY: Wow.
AMANDA: So for me, the legend of the Cool S is alive and well. Again, as recently as 2020, there are, you know, 45-minute YouTube explainers being posted about it. And as recently as 2023, VICE News ripped off another YouTuber to claim that this is like a brand-new investigation, and had a very widely viewed clip on TikTok—
CHELSEY: Okay.
AMANDA: —where people said, "Oh, my God, I didn't know other people did this."
CHELSEY: Sure.
AMANDA: So it's— the cousin of network is alive and well.
CHELSEY: Wow.
JULIA: Wow.
CHELSEY: Yeah. And of course, it all ends in in a capitalist hellscape, like you said.
JULIA: Ain't that just the way?
CHELSEY: Yeah. I guess nobody's probably patented The Game yet.
JULIA: You can't. It's a mind game, you know?
CHELSEY: Which is beautiful, yeah.
JULIA: All we have to do is think about it—
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: —when we're playing, you know?
CHELSEY: It is nice that it's something that can't be monetized in any way.
JULIA: Can't be taken from us.
CHELSEY: Unless you, like, make a T-shirt about it, but that's cute and fun. You can do that. You can make a T-shirt that says you just lost the game. It's fine with me.
JULIA: I will say, the guy who runs losethegame.com has T-shirts available. So you can go to losethegame.com and buy one if you want. He hasn't trademarked it or anything like that.
CHELSEY: As he should.
JULIA: But you can get one out on—
CHELSEY: Out in the universe. We all have to hustle. It's all right. It's not our fault.
JULIA: We all gotta do what we gotta do. He's just a guy in Cornwall, man.
CHELSEY: Oh, man. Wow. Yeah. And the other thing that, like, comes to mind with the game is that there's, like, an aspect of honesty and, like, you have to tell people when you lose.
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: And that's, like, kind of a beautiful thing to me, because you're, like, holding yourself accountable.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: To be honest about when you have thought about the game, but then thusly, cause someone else to lose when you admit it. So it is a fun paradox. It feels like one day—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —philosophers will look back at this and it will become some sort of, you know, popular paradox or something like that, yeah
JULIA: Yeah. I'm sure some anthropologist in the far, far flung future is going to be like, "And they all thought they were playing a game. No one knew what the game was."
AMANDA: I think it matters, though. I think if I was writing a, you know, a late aughts blog post on like, I don't know, Jezebel about this situation, I would say something like, "We live in a society and our individual actions impact others." And I think there is something very beautiful about, again, for me, really time stamped to middle school, but the adolescent experience of realizing that your actions affect others.
JULIA: Hmm.
AMANDA: That other people's reactions and actions bring up something in you, that is fun to be the center of attention, but not too much. And that it can be really fun to be in on a joke, but never good to be the brunt of that joke.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: And so the game really strikes me as something that is like a thing you feel in the know about, a thing that affects you, that cuts across, Julia, social strata of the middle school math classroom. Okay? It doesn't matter if the nerd or the quarterback loses the game, we all lose the game.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: And I think there's something pretty beautiful about that.
CHELSEY: The great equalizer, yeah.
JULIA: We're all playing the game 'till we die, you know?
CHELSEY: Yeah. Yeah. And, I mean, the Network of Cousins, is that an original term?
JULIA: I definitely didn't originate that. I've seen it online several times, but I do love it.
CHELSEY: It's so good.
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: It's so good, I'm going to definitely like, metabolize that into the show, so thank you for gifting me that term.
JULIA: Hell yeah.
CHELSEY: Because we often talk about it. You know, it's like—
JULIA: Of course.
CHELSEY: —friend of a friend, but I'm always thinking it's more cousin-based.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: Yeah.
AMANDA: That's really good.
CHELSEY: Yeah. And I don't know, I think, yeah, the Stussy S or the Cool S is a great example of the way that things mysteriously travel, and, you know, we'll never—
JULIA: Uh-hmm.
CHELSEY: —fully know why, but it's— that's like— what's so special about being that age is because you're so desperate for an inside joke. You're so desperate for that kind of community and identity. And these games definitely bring that to the playground. And, yeah—
JULIA: Literally.
CHELSEY: —literally. And I think it's the same for urban legends. It's like—
AMANDA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: —you know, you're telling a story. You're becoming the center of attention for a moment, a safe moment, and then you're kind of allowing that to spread out. And other people get the gift of telling that story as well. And in terms of urban legends, we all win. That's what I think.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: We do.
JULIA: We do. Thank you for allowing us to do a deep dive into— it's something that, in my mind, until you told us on our show, like, "I've never heard of that before." It was so, like—
CHELSEY: Uh-hmmm.
JULIA: —quintessential for, like, my young adulthood.
AMANDA: Yeah.
JULIA: And, like, you know, the transition from being like a child into a teenager, that I was, like, "No, I have to do—"
CHELSEY: Yeah.
JULIA: "—a deep dive on this, because now I need to know why some people didn't experience this and I did." So it was awesome.
AMANDA: And I'm so excited to hear from listeners about what they grew up with, what was absolutely ubiquitous. We had, like, Bobo Ski Waten Taten as a—
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: —hand game. We had, like, different kinds of crafts that went viral, probably from people's camp friends.
CHELSEY: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
JULIA: Yeah.
AMANDA: About, you know, making beaded lizards or friendship bracelets.
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah.
AMANDA: Which my parents thought was Kabbalah-related.
JULIA: Everyone did the beaded Lizard.
CHELSEY: Oh, yeah. Love that beaded lizard. Uh-huh.
AMANDA: I would rock a beaded lizard right now. So please—
JULIA: It's not that hard.
AMANDA: —let us know, Spirits is @spiritspodcast on all the socials.
CHELSEY: Yeah. And please, we're— we'll be posting about this, and come comment on Instagram @americanhysteriapodcast and tell us, if you remember the game, what you remember. We'd love to hear from you always. It's always fun, so—
JULIA: Your comments are all just gonna be people going, "I lost the game. I lost the game. I lost the game."
CHELSEY: Yeah. And that's okay.
JULIA: That's all right.
AMANDA: We live in a society, people. We're interconnected.
CHELSEY: We live in a society.
JULIA: We do, we do.
CHELSEY: Well, thank you both so much. This has been so fun, and I'm gonna be thinking about this a lot and constantly be losing every day of my life.
JULIA: Yeah, I was gonna say, "Now, you're playing the game, Chelsey."
CHELSEY: I can't get out.
JULIA: "Now, you're playing the game."
AMANDA: Welcome, welcome.
CHELSEY: Except if that person frees me from Tumblr or wherever they're from.
JULIA: Yeah.
CHELSEY: This was American Hysteria. Make sure you listen to Spirits wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support our show and get more of it, you can head to patreon.com/americanhysteria or subscribe on Apple Plus. Not only will you get ad-free episodes, but you also get bonus content, including Hysteria Home Companion, the other podcast I do with our producer, Miranda, where we tell you stories related to the topics that we cover and stories that we know that you'll love. So just head to patreon.com/americanhysteria or subscribe on Apple Plus. Another huge way to help us out is to leave us a five star review on the app of your choosing. You can also leave us a message on our urban legends hotline, about a tale that you remember from growing up, and we might just do an entire episode about it. Head to americanHysteria.com and leave us a message today. American Hysteria's Producer and editor is Miranda Zickler, our associate producer is Riley Swedelius-Smith, and I'm your host, Chelsey Weber-Smith. Thanks as always for listening, and I hope you have a great week.
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