What beats rock? Paper! What beats paper? Scissors, correct! What beats scissors? Running. Rust. The inertia of bureaucracy. Or the crushing malaise of post-industrial modernity.

Don't look at me. I don't make the rules. I'm just reporting the findings of PC Gamer's latest “What Beats Rock” survey of asteroids affecting productivity on their Slack. Sorry to all of you who were looking forward to today's post about video games. I've been busy.

What Beats Rock is simple: a nearly blank web page that invites you to answer the question, “Well, what beats rock?” Then you decide what beats what you wrote, then what beats it, and so on.

Yes, this is an AI-driven game, with all the caveats and fuzziness and soul-searching it implies, but it's really fun. It is also intensely delicious. Gentlemen, I agree with you: the reason it took me longer than it should have to write this article is because I was too immersed in my research. [But I am not alone: both the US and UK teams at PCG have been immersed in the game for at least part of their work lately. It's all Lincoln Carpenter's fault. He was the first to tell us all, “Oh, mental illness beats gumbo.”

Since then, all is lost. Stimulated by hunger, the PC Gamer staff struggled for 45 minutes from discovery to discovery. Bigger fans don't beat bigger fans. Low gravity beats bazookas. Submachine guns beat PhD candidates. Nuggets win swirlies. Harsh words win locks. Bad day I win fer Omen Margit. Jeremy Bentham beats God. Dead dogs win over John Wick. After all of that, we all realized that we had some technical work to do.

Except for me. I decided to write about this as a cunning ploy to keep the work going. It is a perfect scam. Did you know that Francis Fukuyama denies historical materialism?

My only complaint is that it is a little too easy to knock things down. For example, I probably shouldn't have hit the rock pile with “bureaucratic inertia”; the LLM seems more willing to make a decision in favor of the player than I would have liked, even in situations where the player has gotten a little weird with the LLM.

Then again, maybe I'm thinking about it a little too hard.

So if you too are enduring a hot Friday afternoon waiting for the ongoing DataKrash to end, I suggest you take a look at who wins the battle: the global IT infrastructure or the poor guy who pushed the wrong button at the wrong time.