Edward Hopper painted Nighthawks in 1942, six weeks after Pearl Harbor. The painting shows four people in a late-night diner at an unnamed urban intersection. A couple sits together at the counter. A lone man sits on the other side. A server moves in the background. The street outside is empty, the city dark, the light inside the diner unnaturally bright.
The couple is the subject of more analysis than any other pair in American art. They're physically close but their body language creates distance. Neither one is looking at the other. They're together the way people are together at 2 a.m. when the night has run long and conversation has either deepened beyond words or run out entirely. Hopper said the painting came from a restaurant he used to pass on Greenwich Avenue. He wasn't trying to make a statement about alienation. He was painting what he saw.
Rock Paper Scissors finds its way into Nighthawks the same way it finds its way everywhere: as the game that fills silence between people who share space without having anything to say. The couple at the counter is exactly the situation for it. Not a formal decision, not a conflict to resolve. Just something to do with your hands at midnight when the diner is empty and the city outside has gone quiet and neither of you is ready to leave yet.
The painting is at the Art Institute of Chicago and has been there since Hopper donated it in 1942, the same year he made it. It doesn't travel. The WRPSA art series imagines the night the couple played three quick rounds before the server came back. Nobody wins anything. The diner closes eventually. They leave together.