Talking about Internet memes, the cutting edge is probably represented, among others, by the Game.
You are always playing the Game, even if you don’t know about it. There’s only one way to win the Game: you must not think of the Game. As soon as you do, you lose. And you must announce your loss, which makes people around you lose too.
What a meme! The site is absolutely pointless in that it gives no real content; it only serves as a description of itself. People link to it in forum signatures, IM personal statements, in a manner only surpassed by rickrolling as to randomness and uselessness. You can talk about the Game anywhere you want: it’s not related to any discussion and it is not out-of-context enough for people to get mad at you.
Despite all this, the Game has enough philosophical implications to set it apart from usual memes. It sorts of qualifies as one of those “geek in-jokes”: when you meet it it may or may not get a chuckle out of you, but if you have the patience to think about it for a little while you realize all of its gnoseological nonsense.
When did the Game start? According to the rules, it always existed. You don’t need to know you’re playing to lose - but you do need to know in order to lose, and in fact you lose as soon as you know, or remind yourself of it. This means that the creator of the Game, as the site itself declares, was the first one to lose. It is unclear, though, if going through your whole life without ever knowing nor thinking of the Game counts as a win. In that case, every man or woman who lived before the Game was invented has won the Game.
This also means that only those who don’t “meet” the Game may win. But can you win at something whose very existance you don’t know of? Games are defined by a set of rules and by the conventional attribution of a “win” to the player who achieves the goal of the game; it’s the players themselves who give the winner its status; without acknowledgment winning has no value. So, if I see someone who is winning, I should acknowledge his victory; but, by doing so, I’d inform him of the Game, he’d think about it, and he’d lose. On the other hand, if I don’t tell him he’s winning, I’m not acknowledging his merit, so he actually has none.
The Game may be taken as an insightful and pessimistic view of life. You’re always through life, and you can’t escape it alive. The only point in the Game, as a metaphore of life, is losing, and you can only non-lose by quietly ignorance of what you’re going through.
The Game might also be seen as a logical non-sense. If you lose you have to announce it, thus making other people lose. The creator of the Game was the first to lose. When he said “I’ve lost the Game”, those who heard him learnt about the Game, thought of it, and lost. They had to announce it; so those who heard them lost and had to announce it. According to the six degrees theory, the whole Earth population may be reached in a few iterations (maybe more than six, considering the limited hearing range of human beings…). This means that, playing 100% by the rules, the Game is an infinite loop, which makes it instantly impractical and actually impossible.
There’s a lot more to the Game than the meme shows. But popularity spoils everything.
The Game’s website is promoting a world-wide effort to make the whole planet lose the Game on 08/08/08, the day the Beijing Olympic Games begin. The folks are inviting players of the Game to make their loss as noisy as possible, to maximise the number of people reached. The site even goes as far as suggesting a Google bomb, providing a SEO link to include in blogs, articles, and mails; and asking people to edit Wikipedia articles to point readers to the Game’s website. There’s even a program that crawls through the wiki and substitutes “is” with “makes you lose the game and is”.
Will the Game make it to the top? Will it really make the World lose? This might even be a higher achievement than the Firefox 3 mass download world record, in theaters today. But as important as visibility and advertising is these days, should really a meme try to make it to the news?
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