Four square for grown-ups?

Childhood games like tag, dodgeball and rock paper scissors are being reclaimed by adults. Is there some deep societal reason why people are returning to kiddie fun?

By Christopher Noxon

Read more: Games, Childhood, Life

June 28, 2006 | I had a plan. It was a good plan, a solid plan, one I felt sure would outfox and overwhelm the champion. When the time came for our big match, I'd step forward timidly, my expression and stance a picture of submission. Maybe I'd twitch. Then with a go-ahead from the ref, I'd unleash a devastating assault.

Rock, rock, rock.

The mighty fist of rock, thrown three times to the exclusion of a single peaceful paper or crafty scissors -- it was a reckless move, aggressive and obnoxious and sure to rattle the battle-hardened winner of the first annual $50,000 USA Rock Paper Scissors League championship.

That's right: They're now giving 50 grand to players of rock paper scissors, a kids game that's mostly played to settle such high-stakes disputes as who rides shotgun. Ridiculous, I know. But I can't help it -- I feel an irrational attachment to any game that poses a negligible risk of injury and allows me to drink margaritas while playing it. So even though I hadn't qualified for the tournament and had no chance of actually taking home the big money, I did the next-best thing: I worked out a deal to fly to Vegas and play the winner in a best-of-three showdown.

I'd always thought of rock paper scissors as a game of pure chance, so I was puzzled at the discovery of what is called "advanced RPS strategy." Along with a bestselling strategy guide, self-styled RPS experts claim to possess mathematical and even spiritual techniques that can be used to read an opponent and beat the odds. "It's like any great sport," explained tournament promoter Matti Leshem. "When you're well prepared and in the zone and totally focused, you can feel what your opponent is going to throw."

Lacking the time or patience to develop the sort of Jedi oneness with the universe Leshem described, I settled for a quick primer on basic "combination moves" like the Scissor Sandwich (paper, scissor, paper) and the Fistful of Dollars (rock, paper, paper), before deciding on the balls-out gambit known as the Avalanche (rock, rock rock). He'd never know what hit him.

All that pre-game confidence was shaken, however, just before the match when I fell into a conversation with an RPS veteran who'd made it to the final eight from a field of 500. "If all your moves are set in advance, you're fried," advised Kristina Hartman, a 29-year-old pharmaceutical sales rep in a fetching white cowboy hat. Hartman claimed her IQ had been tested at 172, all the better for employing "profiling strategies" and "pattern algorithms." Now the Mensa Cowgirl let me in on a secret: Any experienced RPS player would see my all-rock routine coming a mile away. My genius plan, it turned out, was a total rookie move.

I'd do better, she advised, if I made quick intuitive judgments in response to little things like my opponent's demeanor (tense players throw rock), stance (arms held at side are a good predictor of paper), or even accent (Southern girls throw scissors). Then again, such signs might be "false tells" from advanced players who would also, by the way, be simultaneously sizing me up, running me through a "13-point inspection" described by the RPS guru Master Roshambollah, a former phone psychic and Arthur Andersen researcher whose only advice to me was, "Don't throw paper first -- everyone knows print journalists throw paper first."

It was at that point, at the very moment when my pre-game certainty had crumbled away and been replaced by a complex matrix of guesses and second guesses that a tournament organizer approached and tapped me on the shoulder. The champion was ready for me.

By the time I got to him, Dave McGill looked like he'd just stumbled out of a heap of flaming wreckage. Which, in a way, he had -- McGill had been playing rock paper scissors for six hours straight, egged on by his girlfriend and an endless supply of free Bud Light. In the sudden glare of cameras from NBC and ESPN, the 30-year-old bartender from Omaha, Neb., turned belligerent, cursing liberally and, astonishingly, dissing the game that had just put $50,000 in his pocket.

"Rock paper scissors isn't even a sport," he spat. "A sport is catching a football or getting punched in the face. This is ridiculous."

Ridiculous? Was that just bravado meant to throw me off my game? And as we took our positions on either side of the official RPS referee, I watched the champ's face harden, focusing on that small but essential quantity of skill (5 percent? 2?) that had helped him triumph through a grueling 14 rounds of play. "Engage," called the ref.

And with that, the game was on.

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The specter of 500 adults competing in a televised rock paper scissors tournament may be disturbing -- one local columnist took it as proof that "the apocalypse is here" -- but it's not, in fact, all that unusual. Rock paper scissors is just one of many childhood pastimes that have been enthusiastically reclaimed in recent years by adults who should have, by any traditional standard, outgrown such juvenile nonsense eons ago.

Remember four square? That recess favorite in which you bounce a red playground ball around a blacktop grid? More than a dozen teams now compete in a New England adults-only league. New Yorkers now relive the glories of their window-smashing youth in one of three adult stickball leagues. Jump-rope is the specialty of Double Duchess, a California group whose members do acrobatic routines dressed in Catholic schoolgirl uniforms. Then there's dodgeball, the gladiator contest of the schoolyard set that has, in a strange sort of media feedback loop, become a near-exact reproduction of the semipro fringe sport depicted as absurd comedy in the 2005 Ben Stiller-Vince Vaughn comedy "Dodgeball." There's now an International Dodgeball Federation, an annual championship tournament and talk about introducing dodgeball as an Olympic event.

Easy to mock, absolutely. What's next: Candyland endorsement deals, ESPN hopscotch, skipping footwear by Nike? Regarded in passing, such games look kooky at best, and at worst pathetic. I mean, really: Have we become so desperate to recapture some remnant of our carefree childhoods that we'll ditch all vestiges of dignity the moment some geek in a SpongeBob shirt calls out, Olley olley oxen free?

But I'm not sure it's as sad as all that. To be perfectly honest, I was weirdly thrilled to learn that adults were reclaiming games I remembered from childhood, even if not all my memories were fond. One never quite recovers from the exquisite pain of waiting to be picked for P.E. and realizing it's just you, the chubby kids and the scab-eaters.

Next page: "Use my Brain Blaster," offered my 6-year-old son, handing me a water pistol emblazoned with a pulsing plastic brain