






































OCR Document


 Tradition from the Perspective of 
Children's Games 
Brian Sutton-Smith 

Introduction 

In the conclusions adopted by the participants in the 1988 European 
Seminar on Traditional Games, children's games were included. 
Since I have been studying children's traditional games for the past 
40 years both in my country of birth, New Zealand, and in my 
adopted country, the U.S.A. (Games of New Zealand Children, 
Folkgames of Children, History of Children' s Play), I thought it 
might be useful to convey to you the results of those studies which 
throw light upon the categories of games you are using in your 
collections and upon the concept of the traditional game itself (cfr. 
topology for the classification in appendix, Renson, Manson & De 
Vroede, 1991). Unless otherwise stated, therefore, all mention of 
historical items in this paper are from colonial New Zealand in the 
past and present centuries. This whole paper might be considered 
something of a colonial commentary on the history of traditional 
games. I will frame my remarks in terms of your eight categories: 
ball games, bowl and pin games, throwing games, shooting games, 
fighting games, animal games, locomotion games, and acrobatics. 

The first thing to note is that the first two categories refer to 
agencies of play: the ball, the bowl and the pin; the rest of the 
categories refer to actions: throwing, shooting, fighting, locomotion, 
and acrobatics-excepting animals which refers, one might 
say, to one type of play actor. Not knowing the thought that went 
into this conceptual organization of traditional materials I hesitate 
to to raise issues that you may well have already considered and 
wisely put to one side. But in case it might be helpful a widely 
known approach to this kind of problem, that of Kenneth Burke in 
his Grammar of Motives (1945), suggests that when approaching 
such a problem one should always consider not only types of 
agencies and types of action but also types of actors and their types 
of interaction, as well as types of spatio temporal organization. I 
will keep these organizational considerations in mind as I proceed. 

1. Ball Games 

I am immediately struck by the paradox that using the ball as the 
major category of agency is essentially a twentieth-century attitude. 
As far as children's traditional games are concerned, balls were very 
scarce prior to this century (pig's bladders being more 

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Sutton-Smith 

easily available). The major agencies of play then were quite diverse, 
including prominently knives (stagknife, whittling and play constructions) 
and nuts (conkers), grass (soldiers), tops, whips, strings (cat's cradle), tip cats, 
collections, stilts, kites, hobbyhorses, catapults, wooden whistles, flowers 
(chains), marbles, etc. The most complex games of the nineteenth century in 
colonial New Zealand were not ball games but were the team games of 
running and capture such as the paper chase, prisoner's base, hares and 
hounds, bar the door, chibby, chevvy chase, etc. There is evidence also that 
even in the middle ages the most complex games were often similar running 
games (Opie & Opie, Children's Games 146). That is to say, the twentieth 
century professional sports which make the use of balls so important are in no 
way representative of the major sports of earlier times. 

In case it is helpful I tentatively question, therefore, whether ball games 
should be the only name for this category of agency, even though in our 
century balls are indeed associated with many of the most highly 
professionalized sports (football, cricket, baseball, hockey, basketball). Might 
it not be more relevant to have a category in which to describe the amazing 
diversity of agencies in traditional games. Might it not be simply a category 
of game agency? 

Although not specifically relevant to traditional games, it is useful to 
recognize that although the ball has become the central agency for profes-
sional sports in modem society, the diversity of agencies for children in play 
now operates largely under the quite different guise of commercial toys. In 
addition, whereas the majority of traditional agencies (marbles, knives, 
hoops, stilts etc.) were largely a part of collective activities the majority of 
modem toy agencies are a part of solitary play and as such are a part of the 
great modem leisure shift away from social towards solitary activities. This is 
a shift of considerable duration as the history of toys over the past several 
centuries indicates, mass toys rising in the midst of the twentieth century 
(1850 plus) reflecting the dissemination of this kind of solitariness to all 
social classes. And if one takes the even more radical shift of toys these past 
two decades into electronics (computers and video games), it becomes clear 
that the increasing hegemony of this kind of play in childhood, at least, 
fortells a completely different future for games than does the traditional past. 
Whereas traditional games and modem professional games so clearly involve 
player to player interaction about some critical actions as their essential 
components, the new event in history is clearly this increasing dominance of 
the solitary player interacting with an electronic object. This shift to the 
electronic object (which parallels the kind of shift from collective manual 
work to solitary non manual desk work which is the mark of modem 
bureaucratic civilization) emerges as a totally disjunctive event in the history 
of mass human play. It also casts a more important light on the history and 
key role of agency in all prior play adding to my suggestion that your 
traditional category of agency not be confined to balls but be an exploration 
of the gradual emergence of this phenomenon 

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Perspective of Children's Games 

of agency. We need a better sense of the kinds of agency that have devel- 
oped throughout history and what it was they meant in historical context. 

2. Bowl and Pin Games 

This is a difficult category to comment on from a childhood viewpoint. 
Although bowling is a traditional adult game in many forms throughout 
Europe as well as a major modem form of entertainment in bowling alleys 
and associated professional tournaments, one must look hard to find child 
counterparts of high frequency today. In the last century about the only 
bowling game in which children engaged regularly was marble board, in 
which marbles were bowled through a board with holes in it and numbers 
above the holes indicated how much the player should be rewarded. 
Although this is not exactly a game of chance, given the incompetence of 
the players, it is not exactly a game of skill either. It is a game of luck in 
which being rewarded for lucky shots makes it very much like a game of 
chance. There were other games of the day which were strictly games of 
physical skill and chance in which a die (as in dice) was put on top of a 
stick, and when the stick was knocked over by the rolling (or pitched) marble, 
the player received in return a number of marbles, the same as the number on 
the upturned side of the fallen die. A strict game of chance is defined as one in 
which the outcome must be determined only by a die or roulette wheel, etc. 
No physical skill need be involved. But children's 
games are seldom so pure. Another example is pitch and toss with horse-
shoes, where ringing a peg placed upright in the ground at distance led again 
to a reward of marbles. This was more like marble board insofar as only the 
reward made the game like a game of chance. Pitch and toss in which money 
was thrown against a wall and the winner who landed the closest to the wall 
took all the money was similar. In these games it is not easy to tell whether 
we are talking of physical skill, luck (meaning an accident), chance (use of 
dice etc.), or gambling (which is concerned with getting a reward for the right 
choice or right action). And as far as the physical skill is concerned, it is not 
easy to know whether the games involve a bowling action or a pitching 
action. 

In general these mixed games did not survive the last century in school 
playgrounds largely because of their association in the pedagogic mind with 
gambling, though pitch and toss with money continues to survive amongst 
adolescents. What was important about them in the mind of authorities was 
the element of chance not the elements of bowling or pitching, though they 
perhaps found a certain idleness in these actions contrasted with the vigorous 
throwing, running, and hopping of other skill games. 

And at this point I would like to enter an undoubtedly unpopular brief on 
behalf of studying these combination games of luck or chance or physical 
skill or gambling. Games of pure chance were a very early invention in 
human history, preceding the invention of games of strategy 

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Sutton-Smith 

but apparently subsequent to the development of games of skill. Thus you 
did not in the past century find them amongst Australian aborigines, but you 
did find them throughout the Americas and Africa. In the most extensive 
analyses of games cross culturally in contemporary research, of the most 
elementary as well as more advanced tribal societies, there are 67 societies 
with games of physical skill alone, 61 with games of physical skill and 
games of chance in the same society, 22 with physical skill games and 
strategy games alone, and 30 with physical skill, chance and strategy 
(Roberts & Sutton-Smith). The items of physical skill and chance combined 
in the same game-as in marble board or pitch and toss with a die described 
above--have not been studied in cross cultural research. Games of chance 
alone usually figured such artifacts as the roulette wheel or the dice by 
themselves. But games of physical skill with chance built into the game-as in 
the illustrations I have given before-were probably widespread, and do I 
think deserve your attention as traditional games of special uniqueness. 

The other phenomenon in which physical skill outcomes are treated as a 
luck determinant today is in the widespread gambling on most sports. On one 
estimate currently in the U.S.A. the annual expenditure for all of these kinds 
of chance (pure chance games alone, physical skill and chance in the same 
game, and gambling on physical skill) come to 250 million, about the same 
as the military budget, or about 6% of the gross national product. I do not 
think that the true history of human game play is helped by ignoring this 
most essential form, even if as a group mainly concerned with physical skills 
your organization focuses only on those combination forms of physical skill 
and chance that I have mentioned. There is a very real case to be made for 
the view that games of chance have been and still are the most 
important games in city societies ancient and modem where very few of the 
people have the opportunity to earn their living or gain prowess by personal 
body skill or by the kind of higher level strategies required of and supported 
in leaderly elites. The game of chance models the life of the non privileged 
and non warrior everyman more adequately than does any other game. This 
is especially true when we recognize that throughout most history games 
have been obligatory social forms in which appropriate gender and age ranks 
had to participate and in which other cultural purposes such as sacred and 
ritual decisions were served, so that the element of chance in those games 
was intrinsically a spiritual element indicating the wish of the gods. Games 
of chance were not in any way an element of optional self destruction as 
compulsive gambling has often come to be phrased in modem times. There is 
nothing more traditional about games than relying on elements of luck or 
chance to indicate the way that the gods or spiritual sources wish events to 
eventuate especially in such cultures as believed the gods to be benevolent. 
Where the gods were thought to be malevolent, it is true, such forms of 
divination tended not to be used. 

As a final note I should add that there were in nineteenth century New 

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Perspective of Children's Games 

Zealand also a number of pure skill pitching games having nothing to do 
with luck or reward-egg cap, rotten egg, toddle 'em buck, skittles and quoits-
which have not survived in regular games of childhood. Bowling and 
pitching actions seem to have little rationale in the children's world today. 
Historically, however, the connection of these actions and the varieties of 
chance is a part of very substantial game traditions and of ways of life in 
which it would be quite false to imagine that physical skill could be 
separated out from the issues of good or bad fortune. It is a disservice to 
history to make such a complete separation no matter how much it empha-
sizes contemporary cultural values. 

3. Throwing Games 

There are a host of throwing games of the last century no longer present. 
These include peg tops, whip tops, duckstones, ducks and drakes, dead 
man's dive, throwing hats, stagknife, chibby, cunning joe, tip cat, 
knucklebones, kites, etc. in which all kinds of objects were thrown or hit in 
all kinds of ways (Sutton-Smith, Games of New Zealand Children 121- 
123). Some of these (tip cat, etc.) might better be called hitting than 
throwing games, and some perhaps called tossing games (knucklebones and 
kites) than throwing games. Although nothing of this diversity survives 
today, throwing as in rugby, cricket, softball and baseball, and lacrosse has 
become a regular part of organized games for modem children. The 
nineteenth century team game of throwing caps and keeping them away 
from the other team is closely paralleled to today's game of team frisbee. 
The key skill here has undoubtedly a modem rationale in military hand 
grenades and the javelin throwing, tossing the caber and putting the shot. 
Perhaps the important story to be told here is about the gradual elimination 
of most of these more dangerous games from the repertoire of children's 
play. One might note that Philippe Ariés famous work Centuries of 
Childhood (1962) is for two thirds of its content about the brutal way in 
which schools were used to bring children under civic governance. This 
history of childhood is also in part the history of the domestication of 
children's play with organized games playing a major role in that mollifica-
tion of their energies (Mangan), although the more strict exercise of this 
domestication only began with the supervision of playground play and the 
implied danger of legal liabilities from 1900 onwards. The above games in 
which children threw stones at other stones (duckstones) while one child 
guarded those stones (a game I saw being still played in Apple Village near 
Beograd, Yugoslavia, in 1987 though a ball was thrown), games in which 
children hit cats (or sharp pieces of wood) into crowds of children, or threw 
knives into the soft ground threatening the feet of other children, or whipped 
tips which flew about the playground and through windows when 
so hit, were quickly banned, as were many games of shooting and fighting 
in our next two categories. 

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In part here also we are talking of the vast confinement in play space 
which arrives with the urbanization of society and the dominance of the city 
over the country way of life. The shift from traditional to modem games 
owes much to both the modem organization and formalization of space and 
time in play and the decay of the role of natural seasons. All of which 
teaches us the lesson that any study of traditional games requires some 
knowledge of the cultural contexts to which they were relevant. The same 
game in different parts of Europe might feasibly have served quite different 
purposes, just as the same purpose could be served by quite different games. 
The study of traditional games regardless of cultural context is unfortunately 
not a very high level of scholarship. I do believe that that is the verdict which 
one must bring against a great deal of the folkloric study of games over the 
past 100 years (and I have contributed to this so am as indictable as the rest) 
which has often yielded massive descriptions of the games but told us little 
of how they were used, by whom, when, where, and to what end. Such 
antiquarianism presumes a psychic unity of causation which has very little to 
recommend it in modem social science. 

4. Shooting 

In modem educational discourse it is almost a sacrilege to talk of shooting 
games. The notion that the school playground of childhood in general should 
be a place for bows and arrows, blowpipes, pea shooters, slings, catapults, 
clay shooters, popguns or snowball fights, as it was in the last century, is 
simply unacceptable. Even plastic toy guns appear to be universally 
disallowed in nursery and elementary schools even though they are sold in 
great numbers commercially. In recent surveys I have done (with students) of 
hundreds of schools in the U.S.A. this was the case, even though on the adult 
level the United States, with its gun lobbies, permits guns at the adult level in 
what many see as an entirely excessive way. It is estimated that over half the 
homes in the U.S.A. contain guns. In recent years there have also been 
serious efforts to ban war toys and claims have been made that play with 
such toys is associated with later adult violence, though at present there 
seems no substantial evidence for this proposition (Sutton-Smith "War Toys 
and Childhood Aggression"). Shooting play then is an anomalous form in 
high modem societies where what might be called civilized or feminist 
values increasingly dominate the world of childhood. On an adult level, 
however, there seems to be no lack of such kinds of recreation and in fact a 
constant evolution of novel forms of adult shooting play increasingly reflect 
new laser, computer, and video possibilities. Given that the present debate 
over weapons only continues the much longer one in which peasants were 
often required to play games with military useful weapons (bows and arrows 
and not footballs), it would seem reasonable to suggest that any study of 
traditional shooting requires a study also of the history of warfare and of 
hunting-just one more specific case of the 

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Perspective of Children's Games 
importance of studying social context 

5. Fighting 

Obviously from the above account children tend these days to be discour-
aged from fighting. Playground supervision has put an end to the regular 
playground fighting, initiations, and fighting arena which were characteris-
tic of the last century (Sutton-Smith, History of Children's Play chap 6); it 
has even spelled the end to many very physical and rough games like punch 
king, sacks on the mill, cockfighting, bull in the ring, no man standing, lazy 
stick, or king of the castle. Even the classic pretence fighting or 
playfighting (cops and robbers), in which there is no realistic combat, is now 
under attack by those who see it as one of the major sources of male sexism. 

Oddly enough, children's verbal fighting with each other through teasing 
and insults does not seem to have abated. Their folklore, their cruel jokes, 
parody, nonsense, gross rhymes, dead baby jokes etc. in which they fight 
imaginatively with siblings, peers, teachers, the other gender, or the other 
race, shows no surcease (Bronner). Imaginary fighting with others still fills 
the airwaves and the humors of the world. 

The biggest childhood shift in play terms, however, is from older world 
physical fighting to modem world symbolic fighting using video games and 
computers or using strategy as in board games. In my recent study of New 
Zealand children contrasting their play in 1950 with their play in 1990, the 
biggest change was in the great increase in this latter kind of strategic and 
video fighting. Much of this fighting also takes place in solitariness with no 
other visible or physically real opponent 

A concentration only on physical fighting in traditional games and a 
neglect of the history of games of strategy is fated to miss out on the gradual 
interpenetration of the two throughout history and the gradual replacement of 
the physical by the strategic. Having suggested the unpopular idea that this 
organization should look at the role of chance in physical games, I now add 
that it should look also at the role of strategy in these games. There are very 
few games of simply physical skill left; most sports now contain important 
components of strategy. A study of traditional games that does not look at the 
evolution of the strategic component has to be seriously faulted. Furthermore, 
any study of physical fighting requires I think considerable attention to the 
interactional context of this fighting, whether it be: 
1. solitarily with objects, 
2. dyadic (as in boxing and wrestling), 
3. central person (Sutton-Smith "Two Cultures of Games") as when every 
man fights for himself against every other as in buzkashi of Afghanistan, a 
game in which men on horseback compete with each other to lay a dead calf 
at the feet of the king; or more simply as in a game of hopscotch, 

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4. or some form of team play in small or large groups, (a) the latter being 
relatively role undifferentiated as in most early tribal play or (b) highly 
specialized as in many modem professional sports. 

In my studies, the critical interactional break: in history between 
traditional and modem games comes when equally matched team games 
high in role specialization are substituted for central person mob games in 
which every one competes for himself alone--God for all and everyone for 
himself ("Dieu pour tous et chacun pour soi")--or are substituted for team 
games involving two mobs against each other with little role differentiation. 

6. Animals 

The role of animals in traditional games is generally as predators, scape-
goats, competitors, or as opponents. The role of animals in modem children's 
play is increasingly that of pets. In the latter capacity the animals' role has 
been increasing inversely with the decrease in family size and the loneliness 
of its members. If this category is to persist, it could perhaps become a part 
of a larger category of imaginary companions who have been played with 
throughout history, a category that today would certainly include ghosts, 
monsters, and Ninja Turtles and in earlier times might well have included 
witches, fairies and devils. More seriously though, I believe this category is 
your actor category and should include the names of all the players on the 
stages of game history which today means quarterbacks and coaches and 
referees and judges. I have elsewhere written of the gradual differentiation of 
these play actor roles throughout history (Sutton-Smith "Development of 
Folklore and Games in the Pacific"). One finds relatively little such actor 
differentiation in the play of Aborigines and Amerindians but a great 
increase in the role differentiation of Pacific Islander play with their 
tournaments and parades and judges. 

7. Locomotion 

The only category of traditional games which has persisted as a highly 
diverse and frequent group in children's unorganized locomotive play is that 
of chasing, though modem children do not develop these games into the more 
complex and formal team forms as did their predecessors. Some of the older 
team forms are referred to above, such as prisoner's base or hares and hounds. 
In earlier play these chasing games more often took place in a formal 
patterned way with the use of circles, bases, holding hands, dancing, 
and song. Today, only the most informal have survived. However, just as 
children once chased each other on sledges, in sacks, on stilts, with hobby 
horses, with hoops, with whip tops etc., modem children chase each other 
on bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, canoes, yachts, and snowmobiles. 
The contrast just made also demonstrates the increasing role of vehicles in 
children's locomotorplay. 

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Perspective of Children's Games 

A second and somewhat lower frequency class of locomotion is racing 
and running which has a more pronounced place in modem sport 
professionalization than in earlier times though the consequences for ordinary 
children and their relative prowess in relation to their forbears is uncertain. 
Obviously more children receive specialized training than in earlier times, 
but those not trained may well be less capable because of the sedentary 
nature of modem living. 

Jumping games were prominent traditionally as in leapfrog, fly the 
garter, cap it, buck buck, saddle the nag, johnny on the pony, or monkey on 

the bridge, but none of these have survived. Propelling oneself over the 
backs of others seems not to be a modem proclivity. 

Hopping games, particularly hopscotch, have survived although many 
older forms have not -including hopping base, bumpers, hop peg, and hop the 
hats. The boys' games have not survived; the girls' games have. In this as in a 
number of other cases, the girls have retained traditions which the boys with 
their greater opportunities for modem sports have given up. Similarly many 
traditional games are still preserved amongst the lower socio-economic 
groups and similarly reflect their lack of modem opportunities. 

Skipping games or jump rope has survived, though in New Zealand its 
place has been largely taken by elastics in which players hop in and out of an 
elastic encircling the legs of two others, or one and a table, at successively 
higher levels. The chief difference from traditional games in this case is that 
a game once dominated by males has in this century been taken over by 
females. 

Another small class of locomotor games played by girls in their own 
traditional formation is that in which one girl controls the movements of the 
others who try to approach and take her place as in creeping up, steps and 
stairs, mother may I, etc. This group of games developed in variety and 
frequency throughout the twentieth century and now seem to be fading from 
the scene as girls participate increasingly in hitherto male sports like soccer. 
Their presence throughout earlier history is uncertain. 

Considering the variety of forms of play action that have here been 
compressed under the title of locomotion and their different gender and 
socioeconomic correlates one has to wonder what advantage such compres-
sion has over the clearer terms chasing, racing, jumping, hopping, skipping 
and creeping. A study of each kind and its context is in order surely. 

8. Acrobatics 

This category may also suffer from having to compress too many odd 
variations within this one kind of action. For example, there is the whole 
group of girls' games that involve dancing and singing, which might be 
excluded from consideration because they involve dance, but are in fact the 
most distinctive form of girls' traditional games over the past several 

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hundred years; so they are hard to eliminate. We know that in the middle 
ages these games were danced by young teen age couples as a part of their 
mating rituals, but that with the growth of church and civic suppression they 
became an almost singularly unsophisticated childhood girl concern, 
particularly after about 1800. There are some signs that boys are again 
showing an interest in the quite modem forms where the girls dance in an 
pantomime way singing their rock music derived songs to an admiring boys' 
audience (Opie & Opie Singing Game). The organization of the games as 
chain singing and circle games is, however, today at the simplest levels. In 
the past century these games were often played by older girls in teams or as 
couples. As well as these girls' games, there are others involving 
handclapping and ball bouncing which are likewise notable for their graceful 
and sometimes dance like movements. These too are usually accompanied by 
songs or chants. Like the singing game category they are really not 
acrobatics or gymnastic in the general sense of the term, but they do fit the 
definition provided that they should be "performances requiring skillful 
control of the body." It is also a part of the anomaly of the modem 
playground that girls also spend more time in their spontaneous play than 
boys do in working on gymnastic playground apparatuses (bars, swings, 
trampolines) and in doing handstands, cartwheels, or imitative body postures 
(statues) in ways that are clearly gymnastic. All of these become a part of 
their own competitive games, so even if the above activities of handclapping, 
ball bouncing, and singing games do not seem to be entirely gymnastic, they 
are played by the same gender that specializes in childhood gymnastics. 

Conclusion 

Adopting the game categories of this European Seminar (see appendix) and 
using my own information from childhood changes in games traditional and 
otherwise, I have sought to provide a commentary on the categories. My 
major problem has been with finding these particular actions, agencies, and 
actors sufficiently diverse in themselves to manage the phenomenon, and in 
having considerations of interactive forms and spatio temporal dimensions 
as well as the cultural context completely left out. Still, I realize how 
difficult it is. No given set of categories is ever sufficient in an of itself 
except in terms of the declared purposes of the conceptual system, which in 
this case is to make a break between the traditional and the modem and to 
focus on the physically based traditional activities. My recommendations 
would be: 
1. to consider the characteristic interactional character of these games. 
Traditional team games are more diffuse without much role specialization 
and often they are group games in which one central player takes on 
everyone else, often players vie with each other for that position. The shift to 
our kind of team sports with role differentiation is a major break in game 

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Perspective of Children' s Games 

history (Sutton-Smith "Two Cultures of Games"); 
2. to consider the way in which the dominantly rural character of traditional 
play affected both its spatial deployment (often between villages) and 
temporal occasioning (as affected by natural seasons); 
3. to consider the names of titles of the different kinds of players in each 
game (clowns, fools, cats, dogs, etc.) and the kinds of linkages between such 
game player roles and actions. That is a history of game actors; 
4. to consider the types of game actions as presently provided but with 
provision for the other differentiations (hitting, skipping etc. suggested in the 
above commentary) with attention to their gender and social correlate; 5. to 
create a category devoted entirely to game agencies and consider what 
earlier artifacts have been replaced by the modem ball, the modem electronic 
game, the modem toy, and modem card and board games; 
6. to give due consideration to the elements of chance and strategy in physical skill games 
as these linkages were even most characteristic of earlier historical periods 
than they are today. The metaphor of the game of life is modelled more by 
games of chance for the peasants of modem masses than it is by either 
physical or strategic games; 
7. to take a lesson from the history of the relatively useless antiquarianism 
and survivalism in folklore and not be satisfied simply with game descriptive 
collections. 

Appendix: Games as Traditions 

The games that you will be recording were the customs of earlier people; 
they were not usually their traditions. The concept of tradition adds the 
additional notion of self conscious recognition by the people that the game 
they are performing enhances some other values that they believe they have 
in common. It introduces the notion of history to the notion of custom, or if 
you will the self-consciousness of history to the praxis of custom. In general, 
the concept of tradition as it applies to play, comes to us from the romantic 
era of western society and involves such names as Rousseau, Kant, Goethe, 
Schiller, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Pestalozzi and Fröbel etc. There is in all of 
these writers a sense that certain kinds of games and plays brought with them 
certain kinds of valuable spiritual or creative qualities from nature. When 
Schiller says we are only wholly human when we play, he is thinking not of 
the folkgame practices of children in the muddy streets of eighteenth century 
Mainz, Germany; he is thinking of the reputedly amateur athletes of ancient 
Greece. Or if it is Rousseau, he is not thinking of playful mental fantasies 
but of groups of parochial players in their villages who control each other 
through their physical sports. If it is Wordsworth he is thinking contrarily of 
adults made creative by their own imaginings of things infantile. And if it is 
Kant, he is thinking of the history of science and the role of the subjunctive 
mode of playful thought in invention, in aesthetics and in morality. And 
Fröbel, of course, is thinking 

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Sutton-Smith 

of the spiritual significance of toys in childhood. There are all of these and 
many other ideas gathered together at the beginnings of the nineteenth century 
to create that game self-consciousness which turns games into traditions 
rather than their being just mere practices. 

Games as traditions along with folktales or fairy tales or dances as traditions 
were in the first place all written about to enhance the national, cultural, or 
individual status of those who had once played them and perhaps should 
continue to play them. When Alice B. Gomme made her massive collections 
of English, Scottish, and Irish children's games at the end of the nineteenth 
century, she was as much concerned to reintroduce them into praxis as she 
was to record their extinction, although the folkdancing 
societies of the day were generally more successful in this regard than were 
the folkgame scholars. But Gomme in 1891 brought a group of children to 
the International Folk Lore Congress to demonstrate their games. It is said 
that her singers and dancers were the hit of the congress. By that time as 
the Opies. have said, the philanthropic classes had become convinced that 
poor children needed to be taught how to play these "traditional" games. 
They had supposedly lost or had never had these games as customs and were 
now to be given them as traditions (Bronner 22). 

In 1985 I attended a meeting of the third Rainbow Week International in 
Toulouse, France, where children had been brought from many third world 
countries to demonstrate their games. The intention of the organizers was 
that these "traditional" games should be preserved and should act as a 
counterbalance to the spreading influence of televised sports and Olympics 
which were destroying these traditional physical activities (they were 
including games, dances, initiation rites, motor activities, massages etc.). 
Speakers spoke of the authenticity of the traditional games, their exemplary 
moral status as compared with the stereotypic character of international 
sports. In general, they proposed that schools in their countries should be 
given the task of their preservation. 

The parallel between Gomme in 1891 and Toulouse in 1985 is obvious. We 
have been losing or rather replacing game customs constantly over the past 
few hundred years. What was a European plight, as urbanization and 
industrialization increased dramatically in the 1700's and which led to the 
Romantics attention to play, is now the plight of the whole world. Tradition 
is another name for loss and another name for the attempt to preserve us 
from that loss. This preservation is usually sought in terms of self conscious 
moral or aesthetic or physical values. But in fact these values are newly 
invented in the contemporary cultural situations and are used as a selective 
device for pruning from tradition those aspects of it that are currently 
thought to be undesirable. Neither Lady Gomme in 1891 nor the 
contemporary Rainbow Movement sought to cherish and to teach in schools 
multiple aspects of the savagery, cruelty, and brutality war preparation and 

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Perspective of Children's Games 

sexual preparation which were often endemic parts of traditional games 
(Gomme). 

What they did wish to do was teach in schools those games which they 
personally valued, and of course in the Gomme's case as in the Toulouse 
case, these were the more co-operative and less bellicose games. But 
teaching games thus self consciously by novel social agencies, games which 
had in the past always been a part of the collective inheritance and its own 
inherent means of transmission, makes them into performances rather than 
customs. Most folkloric preservation has been of dances, stories and games 
taken out of their original contexts and turned into performances by the folk 
or abstracted from their original conditions or taken by professionals who 
now present these materials quite out of their original contexts and who 
create new contexts of dancing, storying, and playing for them. It is no 
surprise that the greatest shift in folklore theory in this century has been away 
from some form of "survivalism" where the games are seen as containing 
remnants of times past, to varieties of performance theory which examine the 
way in which the folk materials are presented aesthetically to their audiences 
(Bauman). The inherently aesthetic value claimed for tradition by the early 
Romanticists has now become the focus of how performances create their 
own aesthetics. In modem folklorists' hands 
tradition has largely become a contemporary and existential pursuit rather 
that a pursuit of ancient essences preserved into the present. All of which 
leads up to the position that tradition, perhaps formerly about loss, is now 
about the assertion of contemporary value and the use of selected earlier 
customs to heighten that value. Thus the members of this conference whose 
own major interest is in sports choose to look only at the physical games of 
the past, not the chance of strategic or dancing games. As I have shown, the 
concentration on ball games and on physical actions to the relative exclusion 
of patterns of interaction and spatiotemporal contexts and varieties of players 
reflects that value system. In addition, the effort to find what European 
countries have in common in such traditional physical games just as 
apparently seeks new values in such selected commonalities as well as 
putting in the center of such new found values the physical actions that are 
the hallmarks of their profession and own future. In this light, traditions are 
the reflexive selections and transformations of those aspects of past customs 
which create identity and value for those engaged in this preservation. 
Tradition is the reflection of how we wish to think about ourselves and to be 
accepted by others. Tradition is a rhetoric of our own identity. 

Final Conclusion 

These few remarks on the selective character of "tradition" as well as my 
prior remarks on the selectivity of the categories that have been chosen need 
not, I believe, make any difference to your actual choices which do probably 
reflect your own values quite fairly. My remarks suggest, however, 

15 



 

Sutton-Smith 

that even if you are not responsive to some of the suggestions I have made, 
you are, I believe, required in scholarly terms to be more explicit about your 
own presuppositions, about how you have presupposed traditions. I hope in 
that respect my remarks have been helpful. They are meant to be clarifying 
rather than critical. 

University of Pennsylvania 

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Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice Hall, 1945. 
Gomme, Alice B. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland. 

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Mangan, I.A. The Games Ethic and Imperialism. New York: Viking, 1986. 
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Roberts, I.M., and Brian Sutton-Smith. "Cross Cultural Correlates of 
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