Problem restricting user input in my rock paper scissors game

[ashergreen]

It works! But I have one question: When I programmed in C many years ago, the "user1 != "rock"...." line worked perfectly and also worked when I played with BASIC back in the day. Why doesn't it work with Python? Why do I have to resort to creating a list and executing the while statement or even the for statement from a list?

I would make a separate function to keep looping until it got a valid input and then return that string, like this:

def get_valid_input (player) :
	acceptable_answers = ('rock', 'paper', 'scissors')
	prompt = ", you are up, what's it going to be, rock, paper or scissors? "
	answer = 'BashBedlam was here.'
	while answer not in acceptable_answers :
		answer = input ('\n' + player +  prompt)
		answer = answer.lower ()
	return answer

def start():
	player1 = input("Player one, What is your name? ")
	player2 = input("Player two, What is your name? ")
	user1 = get_valid_input (player1)
	user2 = get_valid_input (player2)
	return (player1, user1, player2, user2)

print (start ())