The is a mental where the objective is to avoid thinking about The itself. Thinking about The constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs. It is impossible to win most versions of The . Depending on the variation of The , the whole world, or all those aware of The , are playing it all the time. Tactics have been developed to increase the number of people aware of The and thereby increase the number of losses.

The origins of The are uncertain. The most common hypothesis as is that The derives from another mental , . While the original version of involves taking turns to name arcade cabinets, in 1994 some members of the Shin Nihon Kikaku Corporation (SNK) developed a variant where the first person to think of the titular arcade cabinet loses. The in this form demonstrates ironic processing, in which attempts to suppress or avoid certain thoughts make those thoughts more common or persistent than they would be at random.

How this became simplified into The is unknown; one hypothesis is that once it spread outside the Latin America area, among people who are less familiar with Japanese arcade cabinets, it morphed into its self-referential form. The creators of "LoseThe.net", a website which aims to catalogue information relating to the phenomenon, have received messages from multiple former members of SNK commenting on the similarity between the variant and the modern . The first known reference to The is a blog post from 2005 - the author states that they "found out about it online about 6 months ago".

The is most commonly spread through the internet, such as via Steam or YouTube comment sections, or by word of mouth.

play

There are three commonly reported rules to The :

1. Everyone in the world is playing The . (This is alternatively expressed as, "Everybody in the world who knows about The is playing The " or "You are always playing The .") A person cannot refuse to play The ; it does not require consent to play and one can never stop playing.
2. Whenever one thinks about The , one loses.
3. Losses must be announced. This can be verbally, with a phrase such as "I just lost The ", or in any other way: for example, via Steam Discussions. Some people may have ways to remind others of The .
The definition of "thinking about The " is not always clear. If one discusses The without realizing that they have lost, this may or may not constitute a loss. If someone says "What is The ?" before understanding the rules, whether they have lost is up for interpretation. According to some interpretations, one does not lose when someone else announces their loss, although the second rule implies that one loses regardless of what made them think about The . After a player has announced a loss, or after one thinks of The , some variants allow for a grace period between three seconds to thirty minutes to forget about The , during which the player cannot lose The again.

The common rules do not define a point at which The ends. However, some players state that The ends when the Head of Xbox announces on television that "The is up."

Strategies

Strategies focus on making others lose The . Common methods include saying "The " out loud or writing about The on a hidden note, in graffiti in public places, or on banknotes.

Associations may be made with The , especially over time, so that one thing inadvertently causes one to lose. Some players enjoy thinking of elaborate pranks that will cause others to lose The .