Here in the west we don't have such things as agency to make decisions, because we live under capitalism.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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We play these games to try to convince ourselves that we have free will, but we're just adding a layer of near-randomness in order to pull the wool over our own eyes. What I'm saying is that rock paper scissors is the ultimate form of ideology.
joquempô
That's wild. In Japanese they say "じゃんけんぽん" when they do rock paper scissors, which is pronounced jankenpon.
Obviously Portuguese had a significant impact on Japanese language and culture with probably the most famous example being tempura. I just wonder which way janken went: from Portuguese to Japanese to vice versa.
Wow, that's crazy, I didn't know that! There's a lot of Japanese immigrants in Brazil, particularly in the region around São Paulo and Paraná, so that might explain the origin of the word. Maybe Portuguese -> Japanese -> Brazilian Portuguese? I'll have to check that out.
edit: I'm particularly interested in this because I've been watching Shogun lol
Wikipedia says it originated in China, became it's modern iteration in Japan, and then spread to the world.
In America we just rev the engines on our gigantic Ford F-350s to see who is the loudest until someone runs out of gas and then we use an app to hire a gas slave to bring us more gas and our hourly burger (required by law)
There's rock-paper-scissors and eeny-meeny-miny-moe
We still use the phrase "draw the short straw" even though we don't actually pull straws much anymore - one person grabs a number of small objects like matches or peices of straw, and breaks the bottom half off one, then gathers them all in their hand so you can't tell which one is short. Everyone pulls out straws until the short straw is pulled, and that person has to do the task.
All the ones people mentioned, also children have a game called "Chatterbox" where they will make a paper origami...pyramid that flips open as you manipulate it with your hands. The game usually has several steps where the person will ask a secondary question like "What's your favourite number, and then flip the pyramid the number of letters in that word, and then ask the person making the question to lift a flap containing the written answer. Really complex devices can have mechanisms that change the conformation of the chatterbox with each answer given and 2 dozen or more possible answers.
We called these cootie catchers
Yeah, we had that here a lot as well. I never knew what they were called, so chatterbox is now a word that I know in English but not in my language lol also, oddly enough, this was very much a girl thing. Growing up, I think I must have seen boys doing this just two or three times, and it was always a really shitty version of the elaborate, pretty chatterboxes that girls did.
I went to a co ed school, and while the girls did put more effort in the boys were also quite into it. One guy made a combination with a paper airplane and kept throwing it at people.
little dudes rock
Nah, growing up in the US, this was also a very "girl" thing
We just called them fortune tellers, because my friends were uncreative I guess.
Not as common but sometimes people do “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10” and the person with the closest guess goes first. Usually something a teacher would do with students starting a game.
My spouse's family are the only people I've seen do this and it doesn't have a name so far as I know, but they will hold out two closed fists and ask you to pick one, having assigned one of two alternatives to each fist without telling which. It's a way to get a random result when you don't want to make a decision.
We also played odds and evens, but we called it "one two three, shoot" because that's what we'd say to start each round.
"nose goes" is another one. Basically, when an unpleasant task comes up, and we need to decide who does it, whoever touches the tip of their nose with their pointer finger LAST has to do the task. It's a good "catch who's not paying attention" method
Also the secret "reverse nose goes" technique, wherein whoever touches their nose first has to do the task.
Common: rock paper scissors, coin flip
Teens and college students: nose goes
Children: eenie meenie miney moe, one two three not it