Читать книгу Montegue Blister’s Strange Games: and other odd things to do with your time - Alan Down - Страница 8

Extreme games and sports are played by fit, highly trained participants and usually involve some degree of danger.

Extreme Rock, Paper, Scissors is just a violent variation on the standard game—basically it’s an excuse for a physical attack on your opponent.

As in the normal version, each player decides and forms the hand position to represent rock, paper or scissors; however, if paper wins it is translated as a slap and the player who wins with this throw may slap his opponent’s hands. If you win with ‘Rock’ this becomes a punch; while scissors are turned into a poke. This changes the dynamics of the game somewhat, in that players will favour one type of assault over another and hence try and win with that throw, so a player wary of being slapped again may try to overplay their opponent with scissors.

There are many variants of Extreme Rock, Paper, Scissors (ERPS) and each is referred to by different names in different countries. One of the most interesting is Dancing RPS, which can be played whilst dancing to music. Here, the three throws are Drum and Bass, Techno and, finally, Waltz. Techno (thrown by waving your arms in the air) beats Drum and Bass (hands make drumming motions), which in turn beats Waltz (arms are formed as if holding an imaginary partner for a waltz). To make the game fair, Waltz then beats Techno.

The French call RPS Rochambeaux. Presumably this inspired the television programme South Park to feature the game Roshambo, which involves male players taking it in turns to kick each other in the groin until one player falls down or gives up.

The well-known game of Rock, Paper, Scissors is hardly strange—although, strangely, it does have a World Championship (Bob ‘the Rock’ Cooper from the UK was the 2006 champion). However, if you consider yourself better than RPS, as its aficionados call it, you need to learn to play Rock, Paper, Scissors 101—the degree-level version.

This version of the game is played exactly like the game you know, except there are a phenomenal 101 possible hand positions. To make the game as random and fair as the standard game, each of the selected shapes beats fifty others, and can, in turn, be beaten by fifty itself. (Simple mathematics reveals that this will cause there to be a less than one percent chance of a tie and a total of 5 050 outcomes.)

The hand positions represent objects ranging from ‘Alien’ to ‘UFO’, ‘Medusa’ to ‘Satan’. These are fully illustrated on the RPS 101 website (see Internet Resources) and range from the obvious hand movements to ones requiring some skill. (The shape for ‘Vampire’ is particularly brilliant.)

As an example of how the game plays, if you choose to go with ‘Gun’ this will shoot ‘Princess’, blast apart ‘Turnip’, but will be resisted by ‘Dragon’. If you choose ‘Baby’, this will spill ‘Beer’, ruin ‘Guitar’ and be unaware of ‘Satan’, but is obviously carried off by ‘Robot’.

Once you have mastered the 101 hand positions and memorised which other positions they beat, then comes the even harder part—finding someone to play against.