2015·The platform era
Charlie Charlie challenge
A Spanish-language playground game that reached the English-speaking internet through an alarmed Dominican news bulletin.
You might remember it as the pencil game, Juego de la Lapicera
A trend people joined in with
- SourceNo single original
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
Two pencils are balanced in a cross on a sheet of paper marked yes and no. You ask Charlie whether he is there. The top pencil, balanced on a round barrel, moves — because it is balanced on a round barrel — and points at an answer. The game is a version of the Spanish Juego de la Lapicera, played by children for decades.
It first appeared in 2015, during the platform era.
Its route to virality is the interesting part. On 29 April 2015 an alarmed Dominican tabloid news report about children summoning a demon was uploaded to YouTube; the unintentional comedy of the bulletin, rather than the game, is what crossed the language barrier. Within weeks the hashtag was global and Catholic clergy in several countries were issuing statements about it.
It burned out within a month, as panics do, and left behind a good case study of how a local moral panic becomes an international joke and then a genuine panic again on arrival. The BBC, Vox and others ran explainers whose main finding was that a pencil balanced on a pencil rolls.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- Two pencils are balanced in a cross on a sheet of paper marked yes and no. You ask Charlie whether he is there. The top pencil, balanced on a round barrel, moves — because it is balanced on a round barrel — and points at an answer. The game is a version of the Spanish Juego de la Lapicera, played by children for decades.