My co-interns and I played rock, paper, scissors for the media tickets to this year’s Giller Prize readings at the International Festival of Authors. I lost. So I went to the Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships instead. Then the next day, I went to watch Sarah Vowell discuss her new book, The Wordy Shipmates, and how the founding of America was influenced by Calvinist ideas of predestination. Coincidence?

“Rock, Paper, Scissors is not a game of chance,” one of the Founding Fathers of the World RPS Society, Graham Walker, tells me, in the cavernous back room of the brewery where the championships are being held. Mathematically speaking, he’s right. In a coin-toss, the results are random: there is a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails, and each flip of the quarter is an independent event. Even if the last hundred times you flipped the coin, it came up tails, on the hundred-and-first flip the odds are still fifty-fifty. It’s senseless. Meaningless. Non-narrative.

RPS, on the other hand, is a system governed by choices. Human beings, as anyone who studies probability knows, are incapable of generating random sequences. Our deepest brain structure won’t allow it. Like the decision to gather up the family and sail to the New World, the decision to throw “Rock” is not a random event. It’s all in accordance with a Plan. (more…)