Help It's A Rat

Help It's A Rat is a traditional mindfuck game, similar in concept to a flash mob but with less violence and pasty geek flesh.

The game is best played in a medium-sized space, preferably with a traffic bias of some sort; good examples include the front of an auditorium or a large stairwell landing. A large, flat room with many entrances and exits is pessimal, as it does not allow the game to naturally congeal; a small space frequently proves insufficient for adequate rat-tramping.

The name of Help It's A Rat must not be punctuated, even in speech. If a verbal production error happens to cause a discernible pause while saying Help It's a Rat, the speaker is required to restart his or her current sentence from scratch until the phrase is emitted properly.

At least three players are required for Help It's A Rat (the Screech, the Shriek, and the Basin), but experimental evidence suggests that the Rat, while technically optional, is really quite pivotal to the experience. Multiple Rats, or multiple Help It's A Rats, never work quite as well as you would think --- but feel free to relearn this lesson, it's in the spirit of things.

The key to a successful Help It's A Rat is the same as a successful gainless political reference: Shock and Awe. As a lemma, you must exercise restraint in planning Help It's A Rat; optimally, exactly one victim will recognize the game for what it is, and only after at least fifteen seconds of pandemonium. The Law of Birthdays is your best friend on this point; in brief, the math works out to no more than three games a year, and never on any predictable schedule!

Some people at Clemson play a variant on Help It's A Rat, but they call it Mongoose, which suggests the basic modifications in theme. We've heard reports of UCSB students playing something called Snakes and Rats, but the ancestry there is obviously hard to pin down. We do think that Help It's A Rat is original to CMU, though we don't have a definite timeline of when it started. No-one's found a reliable source on this claim, and it certainly wouldn't pass Wikipedia's verifiability guidelines.