Evolution of Playground Games - page 3
Keywords: Playground, Games, Playground Games, Folklore, Childhood, Play, School, Child's Play
By elliot5200 on 18/02/2007
Level: Bachelor Honours Degree (BA, BEng, BSc etc)
Page Number: 3 of 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
faces covered with bruises to delay the process of having to join the ‘King’. If the last player manages to get from one end of the playground to the other three times after all the other players have been caught, he is allowed to decide who is ‘King’ for the next game, which is a rule that is not dissimilar to the more modern version Daniel describes.
British Bulldog teaches children the harsh and capitalist lesson that the world is a merciless place and that people should look out for their own needs above others. This is emphasised by Sutton-Smith (1959: 21) who believes that British Bulldog is an adaptation of the game, Bar the Door, which was played as far back as the Middle Ages when it was associated with the dances of death. The person in the middle represented the God of Death and would take the people he caught to Hell. The other players in the game have to flee from him, with a selfish preoccupation on their own lives. This meaning could also be applied to the game, It where the tagger could also represent death.
Thus, British Bulldog has evolved from an extremely violent game to the seemingly harmless game Daniel describes and its connotations of death seem to have been long forgotten. This can be compared to It, which evolved from a game where players had to fight only for themselves to the more optimistic, Stuck in the Mud where players can work together to undo what the tagger – or death – achieves.
Blind Man’s Buff was also a popular playground game while I was in school. A person is chosen to be the ‘blind man’, who wears a blindfold. They are then asked various questions, such as ‘how many fingers am I holding up?’ to ensure they cannot see. They are also spun around to make them disorientated and dizzy. The ‘blind man’ then has to try and catch the other players, who attempt to dodge him. Once he catches someone, they become the new ‘blind man’. Daniel and Melvyn’s account of the game were very similar, implying that the game had not evolved much since the 1960s.
Despite the similarity between the two accounts, the game has evolved considerably to become the game known today. This is evident from the description Pollux (ix: 123) gives of the game in the classical times, where
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