Talk:The Game/Archive 1

message: I have evidence from 2005 of British people (from the University of Kent at Canterbury where they learnt of the Game) playing and discussing the Game online. Also my co-worker at IBM from Warick University apparently used to write "You just lost the Game!" on whiteboards in lecture rooms to get people in the next lecture. I feel that its more than a little arrogant for those claiming that just because they hadn't heard of it before the article it must not exist. There are 53 variations of Tag listed in Wikipedia's article and not a single one has any sources at all (let alone the specific definition of "source" these people are demanding of a game that is based on trying to forget and not mention it). Why aren't these same people up in arms about Tag exactly as they are about The Game? Its because they apreciate that Tag (a child's game) is not the sort of thing that will have a rule book so everyone whose heard of it knows roughly what it is and how to play but there is no source to it. Why can't they then apreciate that The Game (a student game that you are meant to forget and not talk about) is likewise not the sort of thing that will have a rule book so everyone whose heard of it knows roughly what it is and how to play but there is no source to it.
Summary To deleters: There is more online evidence for The Game than the rules and variations of Tag. No matter how much you remember your childhood variation of Tag it still fails against the rules you are applying to The Game with regards to sources and therefore by your own logic Tag does not exist and must have been invented by a couple of school-kids pranking wikipedia inventing a fake game, anyone indepentant who claims otherwise must be lying. Delete both or keep both or you are just another hypocrite. --84.69.10.98 (talk) 08:23, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: The Words of A British Game Player

message: Please edit my post and Write your name if you want the Game to be in the list .
The reason were already told. Plus The admins of the wikipedia in german (and other languages) agree in the game being added!
77.181.128.229 13:18, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry but the idea of signing one's name here as a vote wouldn't seem to do much good; even a quick glance of this page shows a formidable interest in bringing back "The Game" but the minority opposed mainly appear to be admins deleting it not because of lack of consensus, but rather because of lack of sources.  Not to discourage you from trying to have a voice, but it might be more prudent to look for sources to corroborate "The Game"'s existence and prominence.  Here's one ("Mind Game Enlivens Students Across U.S.") and here's another which is also referenced on Wikipedia itself.  That's just a quick cheating look, I'm sure people can come up with others as I remember hearing about this Game well over a decade ago and I wasn't even living in the U.S. at the time (I might search around and add some myself later even). Phil Urich 08:03, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Sign here if you want the game to be added

message: Are you guys serious? The Game is unverifiable? Hah! I live in Akron, OH and i know at least 100 people IN MY HOMETOWN ALONE that play it. I travel, and when i tell people about the game some of them already know! This is a conspiracy to cover up the most clever games ever concieved. This is typical, though. You suppress knowledge. Good job.
::I've found 4 or 5 articles I've wanted to read deleted now (mostly Musicians). But I'm very surprised the game isn't on wikipedia. I don't think people are trying to suppress knowledge on purpose, but I think that more exceptions should be made to the 'notability' rule, etc. -- Lionfish
Man, what happened? I think Wikipedia is a little too bureaucratic about this. ACielecki  —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 00:01, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Hah.

message: Why does The Game (disambiguation) redirect to The Game rather than vice-versa? I have the feeling that some great admin is going to tell me some obvious Wiki-precedent that I don't know about, but I wanted to post this in the chance that this may be a mistake.
Candent shlimazel 19:22, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Disambig?

message: The above 3 discussions don't actually divulge the subject of the controversial article. Making them incomprehensible to most people. I'm assume the article is now The Game (treasure hunt)? ··gracefool☺ 01:38, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ok, this has gone on long enough.  Odds are, there won't be an agreement for a long time, but arguments aside, The Game is well-known enough to constitute an article.  If it wasn't, why would there be this much backlash from this many people over the deletion of the article?  The Game exists, it's played by lots of people (who just lost if they're reading this), and for the large part is misunderstood by those who would simply pass it off as silly or pointless.  To be truthful, there are a lot of silly and pointless things on Wikipedia, since such designations are subjective.  I say, find a "reliable" source (what is reliable, anyway? Because apparently, Wikipedia hates web sources now) and put a link to it instead of an article.  I've been playing the game for over a year (not long compared to some of you) and know that there are enough people at least within my own school who know about it (not even going to mention my coworkers) and have reasonably similar knowledge of The Game to not argue over the rules all the time.  So there MUST be something.  But it's these kind of disputes that make Wikipedia an unreliable source for schoolwork.  Some of my teachers won't even take sources CITED by wikipedia because anyone can come on and change things for no reason, and chances are they'll stay that way a while. -70.161.6.67 07:10, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

text: PS. BTW, ilostthegame.com has the basic rules, though Savethegame is more in-depth  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.161.6.67 (talk) 07:12, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  WTF are you talking about 

message: Since the links to the sites which discuss The Game are spam protected, I can't edit the section above which includes those sites, so let me try this in a new section.
In order to write an article on the meme, you are going to have to provide reliable sources.  No one has yet to do so.  Therefore, as The Game violates the basic tenet of Wikipedia as discussed at WP:V, there can be no article.  Provide sources (and none of those linked above qualify), and there can be an article.  Corvus cornix 20:38, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: spam

message: I'm very curious to know the group of people that are pro The Game the article, and the group of people who are against. What age group do you think? Also, I'm very confused. Could someone, in their own words (without giving me a Wikipedia guidelines page), give me the definition of reliable source? One that is not a logical fallacy please. This comment is no way implying or forcing an opinion, it is due to my own confusion. Hopefully someone can help me out here  Dooga  Talk 06:36, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Statistics

message: Disregarding everyone else's opinions on the matter, I think that The Game (the YOU CAN'T WIN THIS GAME game, for disambiguation) should at least have its own article as an Internet phenomena, at least as a stub or something. Although it's virtually impossible to find any "official" documentation on it, as long as the originator doesn't come forth (with some form of validity, of course, something also virtually impossible on the Interwebs), which means there will pretty much always be people opposing its existence on the Wiki, there's no doubting that it's prominent - and it's growing. I've seen a number of people playing it as well, and it's something that has been rooting itself in the entirety of the Internet for a while, and it's still moving fast. As a phenomena, at least, I feel it fully deserves a page; at least in my opinion, there are a number of articles that have less merit than this anyway.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.117.200.18 (talk) 01:16, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: THE GAME: My Opinion

message: * De Morgen article by Jeroen Verelst. Daily readership: 50,000+
* Kiwi FM by Caleb Anderson. Listeners: 40,000+
* Daily Nebraskan article by Andy Boyle. Daily readership: 20,000+ "the fifth-largest circulation of all newspapers in the state of Nebraska"
* Real Life Comic by Greg Dean. Daily readership: 60,000+
* LoseTheGame.com by Jonty Haywood. Unique hits: 300,000+ (which includes 30,000+ people who were all redirected there on 27th September 2007 after a prank involving the BBC 10PM national news)
* Facebook. Largest Game-based group: 20,000+ (70,000+ members of all Game-base groups)
* BBC Radio 4. Listeners: 6,000,000+ "the second most popular British domestic radio station"  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.189.134.3 (talk) 13:38, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: All of the above fail to actually cite the specific source.  They just mention an "article" or a radio station or whatever.  Please see WP:CITE.  For starters, you might at least mention the date and title of an article.  •  Further, things like a web comic or a Facebook group are not, by any stretch, reliable sources by Wikipedia standards.  Try actually addressing this as a boring old encyclopedia article.  —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 13:23, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Links to the sources for most of these can be found at LoseTheGame.com + /awards.htm (which I can't link to here as it is spam apparantly...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.187.22.214 (talk) 05:40, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Reliable sources for The Game

message: Hi, I'm scythe33. I mostly bother with the scientific sections of Wikipedia, but I ended up here when I searched for this after someone told me about 'the game'.
It seems like lot of you guys are Wikilawyering with the conditions for Verifiability and Notability. The verifiability and notability policies are the way they are for some very good reasons:
*verifiability is meant to ensure that Wikipedia is as accurate as possible.
*notability is meant to ensure that Wikipedia is not full of cruft.
Verifiability, it would seem, is almost silly with this. Nearly every link I've seen that discusses this gives the exact same three rules. While the lack of an argument against an idea is hardly proof, I find it highly doubtful that the real rules of 'the game' are any different from those three-though there are obviously variants. 
Notability here is different. It's pointless to have an article on an encyclopedia if nobody will ever look for information on it in that encyclopedia. By that same token, it'd be ridiculous for us not to have an article on something that many people would want information on-not having an article on XKCD, for example. We can't just pass it off as "here are 8 people who looked it up", but there is another way to look at the question:
*It's rare that someone will look for information on something if they were told about it by its creator. If your friend is in a garage band, the only source of information you need is him.
*It's rare that someone will look for information on something they hear about in a context that is unimportant to them, such as an internet advertisement.
*It's not so rare that if someone hears about something outside of those two possibilities, they might want more information-or, indeed, to verify it.
Now, the person who created the Game is not known, which means that the first possibility is not valid.
Now, a google test is hardly a good argument for making an article, but the nature of the results that Google provides is meaningful. Many of the links go to rather-popular Internet forums. Users on (most) Internet forums usually tend be interested in things they read there-otherwise, they probably would not continue to be active members. Also, with considerable amounts of mentions on forums with large membership, it's not unlikely that a large number of people are reading the threads mentioning the game. If we really want to make sure that we give people information they might want, it'd be good to have an article on the game.
At the same time, though, we need to consider the potential for a good article on the game. If anyone is willing to write it, they could write it in a comment here, or as a sub-page to their userpage, and those who had a problem with the original article(s) could make changes or suggestions they feel are necessary for a week or so, as needed, so that the new version will not be as flawed as the originals (apparently) were.
Thanks,
Scythe33 (talk) 23:23, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I have done both the things you suggest multiple times. Apparently putting an article on your userpage is against some policy... You might be able to find a version of the old article somewhere, most of which were well written, but I think they have all been purged from Wikipedia history (another policy apparently...) OblongCheez (talk) 09:57, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think part of the problem is that a lot of people are campaigning to get "The Game" added solely on the grounds that "it's cool" or "all their friends play it", and that snowballed and resulted in a lot of vandalism and circular sources.  losethegame.com even went so far as to promote an automatic vandalizing tool.  This makes "The Game" appear to be more of a persistent vandalism meme than a "real" phenomenon.  Like any other organism, when attacked, Wikipedia puts up defenses.  The best way to counter this would be top-notch citations to extremely well-known and complete reliable sources.  Those have largely failed to materialize; hence the problem.  —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 13:19, 10 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I always go to BBC News for these types of things. I got this, but it's in h2g2. I suppose it's a start, but that's as far as I'll be taking it.  Scythe33 (talk) 01:59, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Can we get this in perspective? 

message: There are two true requirements to qualify for an article: Notability and Verifiability.
If I can satisfactorally show that "The Game" is both of these (at least as notable and verifiable as any given article), then who would argue that it should not have a page?
First, notability.
Many against creation say that this subject is completely unnotable, like your best friend and your blog. They say that "The Game" is just something a 10th-grader invented and wants an article on. It's not notable. But then what is hopscotch? The same thing. But it has an article. While the game may not be as well-known as hopscotch, it is at least as well known as Believe It Or Not, Joe's Walking On Air. If it weren't notable, why are so many people trying to create it?
Second, verifiability.
There are numerous websites dedicated to the game, and while none of them are exactly a "city paper", they do exist. Since these websites exist, there is knowledge of the game. If the game didn't exist, how could these websites know about it? If enough people play the game for it to be notable, then it MUST exist. Therefore, since it's notable, it logically exists. It can be logically verified. If something is notable, it exists. If it exists and it is notable, as per meta:Wiki is not paper, it should have an article.
To summarize:
If this were not notable, there would be very few people trying to make this an article. If a majority rules that this is notable, then it is. If it's notable, then it must exist; if not in actuality, then the shared idea.
Please point out any flaws, I'll be happy to fix them.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.43.164.23 (talk) 20:54, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Notability", on Wikipedia, does not mean what you think it means.  The fact that lots of people are trying to shove it into Wikipedia does not make it notable.  Please read the guideline on notability.  The fact that any number of arbitrary web sites mention it also does not meet criteria for verifiability.  They need to be reliable sources.  Please read that guideline, too.  —DragonHawk (talk|hist) 05:12, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Here we go again, but I feel this needs a true discussion.