Rock, Paper, Scissors is one of those games that you will see referenced a lot in game design discussions, but the more I read them, the more it becomes clear that a lot of people are taking away the wrong lessons. Let's examine both the game and some relevant lessons for design.
For Starters, we need to break down Rock, Paper, Scissors itself in terms of what the relevant aspects to it are and how they can be applied...or misapplied as appropriate.
1:Â Short Games
Rock, Paper, Scissors is designed with a very short play time. This is incredibly important to understand how designers can misstep in applying its principles to other games. An average game is probably 5-10 seconds. This is blisteringly short for almost any other game. For X-Wing, you won't even have your ships set up i n that time frame, much less moved onto turn 0 asteroid placement. Even for electronic games, in Overwatch you haven't even finished picking teams in this amount of time. The problem is that the entire rest of Rock, Paper, Scissors literally doesn't work without this short play time. Imagine if the process of selecting your element took 30 minutes to an hour, but it didn't meaningfully change the outcome.
2:Â Deigned to be played in sets
Rock, Paper, Scissors is always played in sets at the competitive level, but even at the casual level, the game is almost always played as a "best 2 of 3" , "best 3 of 5" etc. This adds an extra element to the game other than just blind luck because a major factor in influencing your decision will be what elements your opponent has previously utilized. This is why the game is virtually always played in sets even when there is very little at steak like who gets to ride shotgun and pick the radio stations.
3:Â Completely Imbalanced
The game is the exact opposite of balanced on an individual level. Paper never beats Scissors. You can do whatever you want, use whatever cunning strategy comes to mind, but Paper never wins in the Scissors matchup. Conversely, Scissors never loses to paper no matter how bad or new to the game you are. It's just pick and win. Quite literally, the only reason this is treated an even semi-balanced is because of the above two factors i.e. games are short and a single lost game doesn't mean an overall loss.
4:Â All game elements are available to both players at all times
You don't go to a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament with only Rock available...although admittedly this approach would make for some damn short tournaments. At the start of each game, either player can pick from any game element available and use that. This is also a key ingredient to the game because as soon as you only have limited access to the game elements, the obvious imbalance of the individual elements becomes absolutely crippling. All your opponent would have to do in this case would be to figure out what you don't have and you'd be in a situation where victory would be impossible.
You're probably already seeing some limitations to the Rock, Paper, Scissors model in broader games, but this does prompt the question of "Why does the X>Y>Z>X model show up so much in gaming?". That's a great question...shut up, you were totally thinking that and not "when the hell is this going to be over?". Rock, Paper, Scissors is, at its most basic level, 3 archetypes that have a very specific and carefully crafted relationship with one another. Using this model is really helpful in game design for simplifying down incredibly complex systems. If your game didn't employ archetypes, then every individual element would be its own thing which greatly increases design burden especially because, at that point, it's much harder to contextualize its relationship to other elements. For example, if you boiled X-Wing down to it's various archetypes, you could easily categorize an upgrade as being more useful for Jousters or Arc Dodgers or Turrets, which in turn helps you apply a more appropriate value and also understand what that upgrade should and shouldn't do in order to keep the relationship between those elements in tact.Â
It's pretty clear that, in the initial version of X-Wing 1.0, there really weren't archetypes. Wave 1 was almost entirely jousting ships and it took a while for the other archetypes to both emerge and get entrenched in the core of the game. However, once the archetypes solidified, an immediate problem became apparent; jousters sucked. Once the game hit the critical mass and the major archetypes had enough different ships and upgrades to be fully fleshed out, it became apparent that the odd man out in this relationship was the jouster. The only redeeming characteristic of this class was that it generally didn't pay extra points for great maneuver dials, reposition actions (Boost or Barrel Roll) or turrets, but this was little solace when they would go whole games barely getting to shoot. What's interesting to examine here is that you can clearly see a point where FFG started to think of their own game in terms of archetypes as jousters steadily got a much better toolset over the expansions in 1.0.
The first major push that I can map to make Jousters great again...sorry, couldn't resist...was the ARC-170/TIE SF. These ships were both basically jousters. Their dials were good, but not great, their access to resposition actions was pretty limited and, while they did have a secondary firing arc, it was notably weaker than the primary on both ships. Two of these pilots, Norra and Quickdraw, were pretty common to run into even at the competitive level which shows that FFG was at least on the right track with these ships and the other ARC and SF pilots were not in any way unplayable.
What's more interesting, for me at least, is the upgrades we saw across other archetypes that encouraged jousting. Harpoon Missiles were pretty maligned in X-Wing and not without at least some cause, but they did bring jousting back. What's fascinating about the Harpoon is that it actually encourages ships that would avoid the joust like the plague to joust. Miranda was at her weakest on the joust, it's where she can eat the most damage and it's also where eating her shields to buff her weapons can be the most costly, but Harpoons gave a reason to do it anyways. It's an interesting discussion as to whether Harpoons should have been Missiles or Torpedoes. As Torpedoes, they would have buffed a lot of weaker ships (B-Wings, X-Wings, Y-Wings, Star Vipers) and would have limited multiple Harpoons as you would have needed two Torpedo slots instead of just a Missile and Torpedo for Extra Munitions which is less common, but all of those ships are notably more expensive than missile carriers, so it would've limited the impact of harpoons by making their inclusion more costly. It's also noteworthy that more arc dodging ships have Harpoons than Torpedoes, so making them a missile encourages the arc dodgers to dodge arcs less and greed for that missile shot. It's easy to cry power creep on Harpoons because they were much better than the equally costed Concussion Missile, but I don't think that's true. Concussion Missiles saw virtually no play with only the most sporadic of appearances. If an element is so far below the power curve that it almost never sees play, making a version of it that will see play isn't power creep.
Hands down, one of the weirdest buffs to jousting, and stick with me on this because it may seem crazy, was the Trajectory Simulator. Think about it for a minute; until the Trajectory Simulator, when would you catch a bomb laden ship even trying to joust? But that's just what the Trajectory Simulator does, encourage the bomber archetype, one of the least likely archetypes next to turrets, into a joust. This is a pretty impressive accomplishment when you break it down.Â
There's definitely a lot more I could say about the topic and the evolution of the various archetypes, but the Jouster is one of the more interesting because it was at the bottom of the barrel for so long and also includes a lot of iconic Star Wars ships.Â
The two biggest problems with the Rock, Paper, Scissors model is when designers go full Rock, Paper, Scissors or one of the archetypes becomes too weak.
Going full Rock, Paper, Scissors creates a very unfun game experience where one archetype can never win against it's natural predator. It's not simply at a disadvantage, it will never win short of some egregious misplay or absolutely brilliant play. The makes for some very uninteresting games that were essentially decided at list creation/deck construction/character creation etc. and requires very little player input. You'll occasionally see an upset, but frequently the game is such a foregone conclusion that it's not interesting to either player or the casual spectator. This means that there's a lot of impetus on the design team to keep the natural predator, prey relationships between archetypes present, but not completely dominant which a hard balancing act that many design teams fail at.
The second biggest problem is when one of the archetypes becomes too weak in the relationship. There could be a variety of reasons for this ranging from that archetype not getting enough attention, to it's primary prey getting unintentionally buffed, to it's primary predator becoming omni-present. Whenever this happens, the house of cards collapses. Rock, Paper, Scissors without Paper is just an all Rock meta...do you smell something cooking? Ideally, this will only be temporarily as even at it weakest that archetype will still be a natural predator and the prevalence of preferred prey will allow it seep back into the meta, but sometimes this just doesn't happen and the game gets dominated by one archetype.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is an easy way to contextualize a game, but should never be the only way you view a game, both as a player and a designer...unless that game is Rock, Paper, Scissors.