Playground Games

Playground Games, traditional games played by children of junior-school age (7 to 11 years old), without adults, which they learn from one another. Once played in the street, these games are now played either at home or, more often, in school or other playgrounds. The function of the games is largely social. Within a known framework, the children themselves must agree on the rules, select a player to take the principal role (usually by means of a “dipping” or counting-out rhyme), and regulate the behaviour of the players.

Many games have elements in common with the play of other mammals, such as chasing, hiding, pouncing, and pretence fighting. Others are descended from adult activities so old as to seem instinctive: circling in rings, throwing and catching balls, fivestones (jacks), and games of guessing “who hit me on the back?”, all pre-date the Christian era. Evidence for the antiquity of these and other games can be found on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs, on Greek vases and other artefacts, on Roman sarcophagi, and in classical texts. However, some games played around the world may not date back so far. Jump-rope and hopscotch, for example, cannot be traced further back than engravings of the 17th century, when they were already played by children. Skipping in a rope appears to have developed from skipping in a wooden hoop, a sport depicted in the mid-16th century. Apart from written descriptions by the Greek scholar Julius Pollux in the second century ad, detailed knowledge of children’s games and their rules only began with the publishing of children’s games books, an early example of which is John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744). The heyday for the publication of such books, however, was the 19th century. Another source of information was the journal Notes & Queries, from 1846 onwards, and the many regional glossaries.

Playgrounds tend to be dominated by football, which is most boys’ favourite game chiefly because they can emulate the first-class football games they see on television, and space must be reserved for the girls’ games. The appeal of the skipping, ball-bouncing, and clapping games, now played mainly by girls, often lies in their attractively comical or romantic words. Until songs were used for skipping, in the late 19th century, it was mainly a boys’ sport. When the adult singing games—remnants of courtship games played by young adults in the Middle Ages—descended into the possession of children, they lost their true function, and some of the songs were transferred to the skipping rope. Other game rhymes were once popular songs (such as “Horsie, horsie, don’t you stop”), or are from the common repertoire of school rhymes (“Policeman, policeman, don’t catch me”). Some, however, must have been invented for their purpose (for example “All in together, girls” and “A sailor went to sea”).

A staple of the playground is the “side to side” game, in which one player stands at a distance from a row of others; sometimes the players in the row have to run across the space without being caught by the single player (as in “Red Rover”), or are exempted if they are wearing a certain colour (as in “Farmer, farmer, may we cross your golden river?”). Even more popular are guessing games such as “TV Stars”, in which a single player calls out initials and the others have to race across with their answer.

Children’s games fluctuate in popularity. Tops, still whipped in some playgrounds in the 1970s, have disappeared. Hopscotch and jacks have declined, and the standard of marbles play has gone down. The reasons for the changes and decline are manifold: restrictions and bans in playgrounds; streets congested with parked cars and traffic leading to lack of playing space; the general increase in the supervision of children (for their own safety); and the organization of children’s leisure time. The complaint that traditional games are disappearing has been heard since the mid-19th century, and has been blamed successively on the railways, the cinema, “the frequent passage of motor vehicles”, radio, the gramophone, pop music, and, most recently, computer games. However, children are still capable of entertaining themselves, with old games as well as new.