Friday, January 21, 2011

An Old Game (but new to TSG)

"It's very simple. Scissors cuts paper. Paper covers rock. Rock crushes lizard. Lizard poisons Spock. Spock smashes scissors. Scissors decapitates lizard. Lizard eats paper. Paper disproves Spock. Spock vaporizes rock. And as it always has, rock crushes scissors." -- Sheldon Cooper

This post inspired our recent marathon viewing of the second season of The Big Bang Theory  (RPSLS is older than that. Apparently the game pre-dates the CBS sitcom by nearly a decade.)

3 comments:

Parm said...

Ugh. Seems like gilding the lily. There is something wonderfully elegant about rock-paper-scissors. Adding lizards and a humanoid offers not only warrantless complexity, it even stretches the relationships to absurdity. Paper will, indeed, cover a rock, and the latter can certainly crush the scissors. But a humanoid vaporizing a rock? To the extent the humanoid could accomplish this, then much the same fate could be dealt out to the remaining players as well.

This game is new to me, too, and thankfully so.

Willard Biscuit said...

To be sure, RPSLS is a unnecessary update to the original. The inherent added complexity doesn't add anything--other than possible geek cred points. Actually that isn't quite true...TSG tried to engage some cow-orker geeks in a round RPSLS and our efforts were met with complete indifference.

Yes, sometimes the old(er)ways are the best. And while we're on the subject, get off my damn lawn!

Parm said...

You're a humanoid . . . vaporize the lawn stomper!