About

Oating / Oated is a social game/prank where one person hides a container full of dry oats and tricks another person into finding it. Once they find the oats, the person must get on one knee and pour the oats into their mouth and over their face as if chugging them. These videos became popular on TikTok around September of 2020. Oating is a parody of the drinking game icing, which follows the same rules, only with Smirnoff Ice in the place of oats. In many oating videos, it's unclear whether the oating is a planned skit or a prank.

Origin

Sometime in 2010, a drinking game called icing became a trend across social media. The game saw one person hide a bottle of Smirnoff Ice, then record their friend finding it, dropping to one knee, and chugging it (examples shown below, left and right). Falling victim to the prank became known as "getting iced."

On June 14th, 2020, TikToker thetokoftheboys uploaded a skit parodying icing, where a man asks his friend to come into the kitchen to try and open the oven, claiming the door is stuck (shown below). When his friend opens the oven there's a container of oats inside. He walks to the middle of the kitchen, gets on one knee, and "chugs" the oats. The video gained over 5.5 million views and 733 thousand likes in 4 months.

Spread

Over the next few months, a few other TikTokers uploaded videos where someone gets oated, including two June 17th uploads from ohnoanarrow (shown below, left) and nicholas_lenny2 (shown below, right).

The trend started to gain more traction around September of 2020. On September 13th, TikToker tomphilips99 uploaded an oating video, gaining over 1.8 million views in just over a month (shown below, left). On September 19th, TikToker tokmedaddy uploaded an oating video, also gaining over 1.8 million views in a month (shown below, right).

On October 20th, Insider^[1] published a story about oating, detailing its similarity to icing.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References