What beats rock? Paper, correct! What beats paper? Scissors, correct! And what beats scissors? Yep, that's right: Running. Or rust. Or bureaucratic inertia. Or the crushing ennui of post-industrial modernity.

Don't look at me. I don't make the rules. I'm just reporting the findings of What Beats Rock, the latest asteroid to impact productivity in the PC Gamer company Slack. Sorry if you guys were looking forward to articles about videogames today. We're busy.

What Beats Rock is simple: It's a nearly blank webpage that invites you to answer the question of, well, what beats rock? You can write anything: Paper, sure, but also erosion, or time, or a positive mental attitude, and the website's large language model underpinnings will take a second to process your answer and decide if it wins or not. Then you decide what beats the thing you wrote, then what beats that, and so on, and so on, and so on.

So, yes, it's an AI-powered game, with all the caveats and iffiness and soul-searching that implies, but I'm afraid it's very fun indeed. Also, it's intensely moreish. I'll level with you, folks: This article took a lot longer to write than it should have because, well, I just got too enmeshed in my research.

I'm not the only one, though. Both the US and UK teams at PCG have found themselves utterly debilitated by the game for at least part of their workday recently. It's all the fault of our Lincoln Carpenter, who was the first of us to share with the rest that, ah, mental illness beats Gundam? Mental illness beats Gundam.

From then, all was lost. Our hunger piqued, the PC Gamer staff spent a solid 45 minutes or so striving from discovery to discovery. A bigger fan does not beat a big fan. Low gravity beats bazookas. Submachine guns beat PhD candidates. Noogies beat swirlies. A stern word beats rock. Me on a bad day beats Margit, the Fell Omen. Jeremy Bentham beats god. A dead dog beats John Wick. On and on it went until we all collectively realised we technically had jobs to be doing. 

Except me. I decided to write about it in a cunning ploy to keep doing it. It's the perfect scam. Did you know Francis Fukuyama doesn't beat historical materialism? I do, thanks to journalistic investigation. 

My only complaint is that I think it's a little too easy to beat things. I probably should not, for instance, have been able to beat rock with “bureaucratic inertia,” and yet here we are. The LLM seems more willing to decide in the player's favour in situations where the player has gotten a bit weird with it than I would like.

Then again, I might be thinking about it a bit too hard.

So if you're also enduring a hot Friday afternoon waiting for the ongoing DataKrash to end, might I suggest seeing what would win in a fight: Global IT infrastructure or some poor guy hitting a button at a bad time? The answer may surprise you.