Rock Paper Scissors, Minus One

The power of experiential storytelling

Those of you watching the latest series of Squid Games will be viscerally familiar with a variant of the classic Rock Paper Scissors game - ‘Rock Paper Scissors, Minus One’ (RPS-1).

For those who aren’t as up-to-date with the Korean series that blends schoolyard games and ultra-violence, here's an experiment.

You can play the game rather than me explaining the rules to you. It should take less than 10 seconds to have a go (plus there’s absolutely no violence in this version). If you’re on mobile, you might need to turn your phone on its side.

Give it a try, then come back.

Okay, now answer this: Did you get the rules? Would you feel comfortable explaining how RPS-1 works to someone else and playing against them?

That app was written with AI tools, and absolutely no technical knowledge was needed. It took me about 5 minutes to build it. Most of the time was spent finding a version of the rules to feed into the app generator.

This isn’t to brag about my AI skills, or what the tools are capable of. I’m no expert.

But I bet that you would have understood the rules of this variant of the game far quicker by playing it rather than by me writing them all out.

Not just that, but that you would feel much more confident playing in real life. Because you have played it; not just read about it. You’ve grokked it.

The wild thing is, I created that game quicker than it would have taken for me to write out the rules. The experience and level of information I can convey through a game are so much richer.

My hunch might be wrong, but I guess that the answers to the questions I posed above are much more affirmative than they would have been if you just read some instructions.

AI opens up new ways of conveying important information, and the media will be far richer and more interactive than ever.

What stories will you tell?