Origins

The origins of The Game are uncertain. One theory is that when two men missed their last train and had to spend the whole night on a platform, they tried not to think about their situation and whoever did first, lost.  Another is that it was invented in London in 1996 "to annoy people".  The reported earliest known reference on the Internet is from 2002. The idea behind The Game is similar to Douglas Hofstadter's number P, the number of minutes per month a person thinks about the letter P.