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I was driving back from dropping Mikix off at his workplace and I got to thinking.

1.) Jedi can see a few seconds into the future. This is documented in Episode I as an explanation for their apparent incredible reflexes.
2.) RPS is awesome. In case you’re out of the RPS-loop, RPS stands for Rock-Paper-Scissors. It might be worth visiting worldrps.com for more information.

In case you don’t see where I’m going with this, I posit that a game of RPS played between two Jedi would be totally awesome. Jedi #1 is going to throw paper, so Jedi #2 sees this coming and smartly decides to throw scissors, but now Jedi #1 sees that coming and decides to throw rock, etc, until finally time gets to be too short to start changing your mind anymore and the throws would finally come down, revealing the wiser Jedi as the winner. Oh man, it would be so intense.

A deeper analysis follows.

Mind Tricks: The Jedi are seen frequently waving their hands around and convincing other people to believe whatever the Jedi want them to believe. This is shown not to work on people with “strong minds”, but I don’t think a situation where a Jedi tries to mind trick another Jedi has ever come up. Assuming it could work, possibly if the opponent Jedi were caught off-guard, then a mind trick could be used to convince the opponent to throw paper, allowing you to counter with scissors in a classic move called Paper Clipping.

Cloaking: In Episodes I through III, Senator Palpatine managed to frequently deal with the Jedi council and they never suspected he was a Sith. Clearly, the Sith have some sort of cloaking ability that lets them mask their intentions from other Jedi. This would be a powerful tool in RPS, allowing you to prevent your opponent from seeing your next move, or possibly letting him think he has predicted your throw while secretly plotting a different one.

The light side and the dark side of the Force grant access to different strategies, making the prospect of Jedi RPS even cooler. Deception and prediction are key tools in the game, and Jedi and Sith have plenty of both. I look forward to seeing an RPS match in Episode VII.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 8:41 am and is filed under Movies, Overanalyzation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.