Older and more serious than you think.

You might tell yourself the auction was a fluke. One eccentric businessman and a lucky guess by a child. It was not. All over the world and far back into history, this game has been treated as precisely what it is by people who long ago stopped laughing at it. Begin with its age, because triviality does not survive 3,000 years. And triviality does not cross every border on Earth. Depth does. The roots of this game run back into ancient China, to hand games played for forfeits and drink, where two people would throw fingers and read each other across a low table by lamplight. From there it traveled to Japan, where it became something taken seriously enough to grow a whole family of games around it. The Ken games, hand games of gesture and bluff, refined over centuries into a small art. The version the world eventually inherited, the one with rock and paper and scissors, is only the most famous member of a much older lineage.

The most telling of its ancestors is a game called Mushi-Ken, a three-way duel between a snake, a frog, and a slug, thrown with the fingers. The snake devours the frog. The frog devours the slug. And the slug — this is the detail that should stop you — somehow defeats the snake. There is no reason in the natural world a slug should frighten a snake. The folklore supplied one, a tale of venom and slime. But the truth is that the people who built the game did not care about the biology. They needed a third creature that could close the loop. So that no animal was strongest. So that every creature was both predator and prey. So that the game could never be won by simply choosing the most powerful thing. They built, on purpose, a world with no king in it. That was the entire design.

The Edo-era Japanese loved this shape so much they dressed it in other costumes. In Kitsune-Ken, played with the whole body in tea houses, a fox beats a village headman, the headman beats a hunter, and the hunter with his gun beats the fox. The fox bewitches the man of authority. Authority commands the armed man. The armed man shoots the fox. Power, cunning, and force arranged in a ring so that each defeats one and falls to another. People drank and laughed and lost and played again. And what they were practicing, without ever naming it, was the oldest strategic structure there is.

What should stop you is how universal the shape turned out to be. The same three-cornered standoff was invented independently by people who had never met and shared no language, because it is not an arbitrary invention at all. It is the simplest possible structure for a fair fight. The fewest moving parts you can assemble and still guarantee that no choice is ever safe. That power answers to cunning, and cunning to force, and force back to power, around without end. Humanity keeps rediscovering it for the same reason it keeps rediscovering the wheel. It is one of the few shapes reality leaves lying around for us to find. And we found it and handed it to our children and forgot what we had found.

And it has never stopped being taken seriously by those who look closely. There has been a World Rock Paper Scissors Society, with championships and real prize money, drawing players who trained for the tournaments the way a fighter trains for a bout. Around the game there grew an entire opening theory, named three-throw sequences cataloged and studied the way a chess player studies the Sicilian. Three rocks in a row is the Avalanche. Three papers is the Bureaucrat. There are dozens of them, each a small trap built out of how a particular kind of opponent is likely to read the shapes that came before. It has been played for $50,000 on a stage in Las Vegas under lights as a televised sport with a roaring crowd. And in 2006, a federal judge in Florida, worn past the end of his patience by two lawyers who could not agree on something trivial, ordered them to settle it with a single game of rock, paper, scissors — reaching, as the law itself, for this game as the fairest tiebreaker it knew. None of them were being silly. Every one of them had noticed the thing the children noticed. They simply looked.