South Koreans set ‘paper, rock, scissors’ record

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A group of 200 South Koreans set a Guinness World Record for playing ‘Paper, Rock, Scissors’ for just over 86 hours non-stop earlier this week. The group, an eclectic mix of people including college students and octogenarians, started approximately 9am on Tuesday morning and didn’t stop until just after 11pm Friday evening.

“We started with two big circles of people facing each other, then did one-on-one tournaments, then just went around the room until we couldn’t move anymore,” said Ga Ba  Bo, an organizer for the event. One of the participants noted how he had welts from playing the ‘hitting’ version more common amongst the younger participants.

John Rockford, the Guinness World Records spokesperson covering the event, confirmed the record, but maintained that this would be a one-time attempt. “We don’t want to encourage people to play frivolous children’s games for hours on end,” Rockford said.

A representative from the World RPS society expressed amazement at the “group’s ability to play the game with no strategy or point”, although he declined to participate in the record.

Although the record is considered a ‘nonstop’ record, the participants were allowed five-minute breaks every two hours. During those times, Mr. Ga said “we kept up our spirits watching Korean soccer, eating kimchi, and drinking instant coffee.”

In a simultaneous world record attempt, a number of teenage Korean boys attempted to set a record for longest non-stop playing of a computer game. The current record of 50 hours, set by six gamers from the Netherlands, is still safe. They started at approximately the same time as the other gamers, but fell far short of the record. One of them with a username of ‘ParkBeatsJapan’ said “we couldn’t keep up our intensity as the other group did.” Another user, code named ‘DokdoIsOurs’ said he “spent more time keeping track of how many rocks, how many papers, and how many scissors” than playing Sudden Attack.

 

This is satire – after having heard one of the classrooms play for seemingly half of the class, this is exactly what I pictured happening when they grew up. For more satire, hit the Satire tag at the top.

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