The Object To Your Left

Confirmed 81,067

Part of a series on Online Forum Games. [View Related Entries]

About

The Object To Your Left is an online forum game in which users are prompted to identify the object closest to their left hand side as their defensive weapon in a hypothetical disastrous scenario, such as a zombie apocalypse. The activity can be seen as a variation of site-specific online forum games that play on spontaneity and randomness, such as "smash face on keyboard, post results" and "the post ending in a specific number".

Origin

"Object to Your Left" threads have appeared on Yahoo! Answers^[13] since as early as May 18th, 2009, when Mayhem asked users to fill in the blank of the quote “The people have a right to the truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of ______” with the item found on their left. One of the most popular renditions of the game suggest that the object found will be your weapon in a zombie apocalypse. It is often found in a shareable image with a hand pointing left. One of the earliest instances of that image was posted to the blog Design Crush^[1] on August 9th, 2010.

Spread

On September 7th, 2010, the zombie apocalypse image was reposted on humor site My[confined]Space,^[3] followed by Geekologie^[2] and Geek.com^[5] within five days. That month, threads for this game, with or without the finger-pointing image, were started on the California firearm enthusiast forum, Calgun^[4], computer enthusiast forum AnandTech^[6], MMORPG Dofus Forum^[7], Reddit^[10] and the BodyBuilding Forums.^[8] The game has also appeared on the Social Anxiety Support forum^[14], MMO Champion forums^[15] as well as humor site Sodahead.^[16] The game also enjoys a significant following on Tumblr^[22], particularly among roleplay-bloggers engaged in various survivalist scenarios.

The Object to the Right

In October 2010, an image with a red arrow pointing to the right was shared on FunnyJunk^[23], suggesting that the item found on the viewer's right would become their weapon in the zombie apocalypse instead. Other forums that had had games using the object to one's right include Newgrounds^[24], BasilMarket^[17], SodaHead^[18], Gaia Online^[19] and the Experience Project.^[20] Additionally, more than 20 questions have been asked on Yahoo!Answers.^[21]

In Rage Comics

In November 2010, the first rage comic about the game (below right) was posted on FunnyJunk^[9] which depicted the person finding a cell phone and using it to call a gun dealer from Grand Theft Auto. On March 16th, 2012, a Reddit^[11] rage comic was shared (below left) about the viewer finding a television, which earned 3610 upvotes and 882 points overall. Following this comic, more than 20 more rage comics^[12] were submitted to the F7U12 subreddit about people's responses to the zombie apocalypse image.