Xavier Prou, who works under the name Blek le Rat, is generally credited as the artist who brought stencil graffiti to the streets of Paris beginning in 1981. He started with rats because, as he said, rats are the only free animal in the city — they go where they want, live where they can, and cannot be controlled or owned. The rats became his signature. Banksy, who came later and is better known, has cited him as an influence.
The question the WRPSA art series poses through this piece is simple: if all human institutions ended tomorrow, what would survive?
Not governments. Not corporations. Not the structures people build to organize other people's behavior. Those are documented as fragile in ways that the last century has demonstrated repeatedly.
Rock Paper Scissors would survive. It requires no infrastructure, no written language, no shared institution beyond the moment of the game itself. Two people, three gestures, a simultaneous reveal. The rules are demonstrable without words: show Rock, show Scissors, mime the crush. The other person understands. The game proceeds.
Blek le Rat's stencils work because they're immediate and illegible to erasure. You paint over them, they're gone. The image persists in documentation, in photographs, in memory. The game works the same way. You can't legislate Rock Paper Scissors away. You can't regulate it out of existence. Two people who both know three gestures will play it whether or not anyone has authorized them to.
The rats survived the city's attempts to control them. The game survived every period of human history in which it existed. These two facts, placed alongside each other, make a reasonable claim about what endures.