history of charlie charlie

 According to Caitlyn Dewey of The Washington Post, this game is valuable as an example of cross-cultural viral trends:

Charlie makes a killer case study in virality and how things move in and out of languages and cultures online. You'll notice, for instance, a lot of players and reporters talking about the game as if it were new, when it's actually—and more interestingly, I think—an old game that has just recently crossed the language divide. 

Maria Elena Navez of BBC Mundo said "There's no demon called 'Charlie' in Mexico," and suggested that Mexican demons with English names (rather than, say, "Carlitos") are "usually American inventions." Urban legend expert David Emery says that some versions of the game have copied the ghost story La Llorona, popular in Hispanic America, but the pencil game is not a Mexican tradition. Joseph Laycock, a professor of religious studies at Texas State University argued that while Charlie is "most often described as a "Mexican ghost," it appears that Christian critics reframed the game as Satanic almost immediately, due to their desire to "claim a monopoly on wholesome encounters with the supernatural.