The Pointing Game, also called Ish and Shadowboxing, is a children's game that exploded in popularity in the latter half of 2019.

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Ish is a game where two people square off face to face and take turns pointing either left, right, down, or up.

It's sort of similar to "Rock, Paper, Scissors," except the goal is to avoid looking in the same direction that your opponent is pointing. There is no physical contact and games typically last less than one minute. ^[1]

The first recognizable instance of the game's appearance in popular culture was the 1997 Super Nintendo video game called Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. In English, it is called the "Look the other way game", but in the Japanese version it's referred to as "Atchimuitehoi." Ish resurfaced as a mini-game in the 1999 Nintendo game, Mario Party 2. ^[2][4]

The game was mentioned in a Taiken article from 2016 called "Acchi, Muite, Hoi: The New Japanese Children's Game."

It wasn't until August 24th of 2019 that the game really permeated American culture.

A Reddit post titled "Class freaks out over game where if you look at the direction your opponent is pointing, you lose." raked in nearly 45,000 upvotes. Shortly afterwards, videos of people playing the game began to pop up all over the internet. ^[3][5]