The Lying Game
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The Lying Game is a game popularized in 2000 at Pennsylvania State University. The goal of the game is to tell a Lie that becomes widely accepted as true by other individuals, or proselytes. The ultimate victory condition, however, is not satisfied until the Lie is repeated back to its Originator as fact by a proselyte not initially converted by the Originator. Such a situation constitutes a "win" in The Lying Game. Each Lie told can be thought of as a "round", and the round ends either when suspicious people confront the originator and he admits the fabrication or, less dramatically, all people who have been told the Lie cease to believe it and subsequently cease to spread it as fact.
At this time, there have been no known wins at the game, and success has only been measured by the number of Proselytes converted to any given lie.
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[edit] Independent Confirmation
A key strategy in The Lying Game is that of "independent confirmation", in which a third party enters the conversation to confirm the Lie, appearing unbiased and independent. In fact, this is simply a form of collusion. For example, if Adam tells Melissa a Lie, and Joe happens to walk into the room and say, "Oh yes, I heard that too", this third party confirmation aids in converting Melissa. The universal sign to indicate to a third party that one is playing The Lying Game is to use the figure "Eighty Percent" in the Lie (four fifths or eight tenths are also acceptable adaptations of this signal). The universal sign allows the originator to signal to the third party spontaneously that the game is afoot, and thus achieve an independent confirmation without little or no premeditation.
[edit] Criteria of Successful Lies
All good Lies share two qualities:
1. They must contain some small grain of plausibility.
2. They must be naturally difficult to verify (but nonetheless ultimately falsifiable).
For example, "my brother is ten feet tall" would be a poor Lie. First, ten feet is an implausible height. No one has ever been ten feet tall, and the mere existence of such a person would be incredible news that many people would be familiar with. Second, it is very easy to verify whether the Originator has a brother and, if so, whether that person is ten feet tall.
Most participants acknowledge that finding a Lie that is naturally difficult to verify is far more difficult than finding a Lie that is minimally plausible. However, the less plausible a Lie is, the more enjoyable it is for the Originator in the event that Proselytes are converted and pass it along as factual information.
[edit] Successful Lies
The three most successful lying game Lies have all conformed, in some degree, to both of these criteria.
1. The first relatively successful Lie involved the existence of a water futon. A water futon was purported to be a piece of furniture consisting of a frame and water-filled mattress that was convertible from a bed to a couch or loveseat, similar to the way an actual futon functions. To overcome the obvious difficulties that gravity would pose for such an item, it was purported that the mattress contained some sort of "chamber system". This Lie was somewhat plausible to the extent that it is possible to conceive of a "chamber system" which might be successful in its goal. The Lie was also difficult, though not impossible, to verify. Of course, proving that such an item (or any item) does not exist is often a difficult thing, and the Originator should be careful not to stray far from the requirement of falsifiability at the risk of exercising gamesmanship.
Simple claims of "I read about it in an article," or "It's available in Europe [or some other foreign locale]," can fight off claims of falsehood for some time. Ultimately, however, this verification problem contributed to a general disbelief in the Lie before it could return to the Originator. Before its demise, this lie had dozens of people clamoring for a good night's sleep on a water futon.
2. The second successful Lie postulated the existence of a form of speed reading known as "Shotgun Reading". Shotgun Reading was purported to be a system by which a reader could train him or herself to ignore all vowels while reading. Indeed, the term was allegedly was derived from shotgun sequencing, or the technique of blasting apart a strand of DNA to allow for faster identification of its composition. Shotgun Reading similarly allowed the reader to "blast" the vowels from a particular sequence of text, decreasing the number of letters he or she needed to process per word, and thereby increasing the number of words he or she could read in a given length of time (the Lie was predicated on the fiction that the human brain processed letters individually and each took a specific amount of time, i.e. it takes the brain 1 millisecond to process a letter therefore it takes 9 milliseconds to process "exception" but only 5 milliseconds to process the vowel-less "xcptn").
The Lie was minimally plausible because, in a competitive scholastic setting, students will often try anything to get an advantage, no matter how strange it may seem at first blush. From this proposition also sprang the verification component. The Originator claimed that he did not want to tell people how to find out more about Shotgun Reading because he wished to keep the advantage to himself. Eventually, as ever-increasing numbers of people began to consider the underlying assumptions of the Lie, it was exposed as a falsehood. This Lie has been retried in several new venues with similar success trajectories, although it has yet become a 'Win'.
3. The final example is the most successful Lie ever told in The Lying Game. The round is still open, and the Originators hope one day to hear it reported as true by a Proselyte. The Lie concerned the Hetzel Union Building (commonly known as the HUB) at the Pennsylvania State University. Two Originators claimed that the HUB (specifically, the basement), was a stop on the Underground Railroad during the American Civil War. The plausibility of this lie came from the leading role that many residents of Pennsylvania, specifically the Quakers, took in abolitionism. Additionally, one wing of the HUB was named after noted civil rights activist Paul Robeson. The Lie also relied on the fact that the Underground Railroad was, necessarily, a secretive operation.
Unfortunately, the distance of State College, Pennsylvania from the traditional route of the Underground Railroad and, more notably, the fact that the HUB was not constructed until 1953, made the Lie completely impossible upon investigation. Of course, the Lie acquired some natural lack of verifiability due to the aforementioned clandestine nature of the Underground Railroad. Because it was so secretive, Proselytes have been willing to accept that there is information about it of which they are unaware. Additionally, the absence of such information from any given historical record could be adequately explained away by citing incompleteness, or the relative insignificance of naming every particular stop ever used throughout the history of the Railroad. Additionally, an original, signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is currently on display at the the Pennsylvania State University, and will be until April, 2007. This true, verifiable fact also serves to lend credence to the Lie, as the Lie provides an extra reason that the document should be on display at the University.
This Lie has attained the greatest level of penetration of any Lie to date. The Originators converted a single Proselyte, who converted another, who repeated it during a large meeting to a group of roughly one hundred people. Once a Lie reaches this level of disconnection from the Originator, a far greater chance of success exists for a Win. While neither of the Originators have yet to hear the Lie back as fact, thereby accruing a "win", they remain hopeful.
[edit] Unsuccessful Lies
The following lies were told in other well-known rounds of the Lying Game:
1. Elvis Presley commonly wore a cardboard toilet paper tube around his penis during stage performances to minimize the effects of an untimely erection.
2. An early prototype of the telephone was a steam-powered model. This boasted the advantage of requiring no electricity, but perhaps more importantly, contained a built-in ringer which would whistle like a tea kettle when a call was received.
"The Lying Game" was also the title of episodes of both The Lone Gunmen and That's So Raven.
