Children's Games in the New Media Age

Childlore, Media and the Playground

Chris Richards, Andrew Burn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317167556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The result of a unique research project exploring the relationship between children's vernacular play cultures and their media-based play, this collection challenges two popular misconceptions about children's play: that it is depleted or even dying out and that it is threatened by contemporary media such as television and computer games. A key element in the research was the digitization and analysis of Iona and Peter Opie's sound recordings of children's playground and street games from the 1970s and 1980s. This framed and enabled the research team's studies both of the Opies' documents of mid-twentieth-century play culture and, through a two-year ethnographic study of play and games in two primary school playgrounds, contemporary children's play cultures. In addition the research included the use of a prototype computer game to capture playground games and the making of a documentary film. Drawing on this extraordinary data set, the volume poses three questions: What do these hitherto unseen sources reveal about the games, songs and rhymes the Opies and others collected in the mid-twentieth century? What has happened to these vernacular forms? How are the forms of vernacular play that are transmitted in playgrounds, homes and streets transfigured in the new media age? In addressing these questions, the contributors reflect on the changing face of childhood in the twenty-first century - in relation to questions of gender and power and with attention to the children's own participation in producing the ethnographic record of their lives.

Chapter 1

Children’s Playground Games in the New Media Age

Andrew Burn

Introduction: Childhood, Childlore and the Media

The generally-held opinion, both inside and outside academic circles, was that children no longer cherished their traditional lore. We were told that the young had lost the power of entertaining themselves; that the cinema, the wireless, and television had become the focus of their attention; and that we had started our investigation fifty years too late. (Opie and Opie, 1959: v)

This book emerges from a project¹ centrally concerned with the relationship between children’s traditional play cultures and their media-based play, an issue addressed by the British folklorists Iona and Peter Opie over 50 years ago. We explored this relationship in a variety of ways, described in this chapter and more fully in the chapters that follow. Briefly, we pursued five activities. We digitised, catalogued and selectively analysed the sound recordings of Iona and Peter Opie in the British Library Sound Archive – recordings of children’s playground and street games from the 1970s and 80s. We conducted a two-year ethnographic study of play and games in two primary school playgrounds in the UK, one in London, one in Sheffield. We developed a website at the British Library (www.bl.uk/playtimes), which presents examples of games over the last century, including selections from both the Opie archive and our own study. We made a documentary film of the games played in these two playgrounds. Finally, we developed a proof-of-concept prototype motion tracking research tool and computer game adaptation which both captures children’s physical play and allows them to play against the computer.

The intention was to build on the pioneering work of the Opies, and re-present their audio recordings for new and old audiences; and to extend and add to the body of work they and others have accumulated over the last 60 years or so. The project carried the study of oral transmission into the cultural moment of the digital age, where the fluidity, performativity and inventiveness of playground games, the computer game console and the participatory internet co-exist and interpenetrate.

This chapter will briefly consider the history of popular and academic perceptions of children’s games, songs and rhymes, in relation to changing constructions of childhood and of the agency of children. It will then describe the research project before moving on to propose three broad categories to help identify what might be specific to children’s games in the age of new media.

In the academic field, children’s folklore has been an object of study for over 150 years, with researchers recognising playground games and songs as important cultural texts. Early collections enact a desire to preserve and protect traditional rhymes and games (Halliwell 1849; Gomme 1894/8), while more recent ones emphasise the inventiveness and richness of an oral tradition sustained by children alone (Opie and Opie, 1959, 1969, 1985).

A notable theme of this research is what the Opies call the ‘wear and repair during transmission’ (1959). Studies note the interplay between historical continuities and the continual change, evident in playground responses to contemporary cultural preoccupations. Children’s games reflect ‘continuity and change, stability and variation, dynamism and conservatism’ (Bishop and Curtis, 2001: 10). We explored these paradoxes of oral culture, setting them against analogous forms of preservation and rapid change in the new media of the digital age.

Children’s playground games have been investigated from various perspectives: as forms of identity and socialisation (James, 1993); as linguistic patterns (Crystal, 1998); as informal literacies (Grugeon, 1988); as musical and compositional practice (Marsh, 2008); as forms of creative learning (Bishop and Curtis, 2001) and, of course, as play (Sutton-Smith, 1995; 2001). However, our team was multi-disciplinary, including specialisms in folklore and ethnomusicology, media and cultural studies, software design, history and sociolinguistics. This gave us the opportunity to conduct a conversation about the phenomena of play from several different perspectives, applying different analytical and theoretical approaches. While we cannot pretend to have produced an ideal inter-disciplinary synthesis, we can at least claim to have made a sustained effort to attend to the many different aspects of playground culture that we found, in ways unconfined by any one of these disciplines.

Although many collections record the integration of popular cultural references (pop songs, advertising jingles, theme tunes, soap operas and other genres) into games and songs, the evolving relation of play to the media cultures of contemporary childhood has remained under-researched, though there has been a long-standing critique of the infiltration of popular and commercial culture into children’s play (Elkind, 2006; Postman, 1983). However, the Opies found productive connections between play and the practices of children’s media culture and, more recently, Marsh (2001) and Bishop et al (2006) have also emphasised the importance of media cultures to children’s play. Our research develops this theme, finding evidence of a rich expansion of pretend play drawing on the landscape of both old and new media, including dramatic games which incorporate the structures, imagery and rule-systems of computer games.

The Work of the Project

The project had five major outcomes, which are represented in various ways across the chapters of this book.

The British Library Digital Archive

The digital archive includes The Opie Collection of Children’s Games and Songs, now fully annotated and catalogued, and available as streamed audio to researchers worldwide at www.bl.uk/sounds. This collection of recordings contains a good deal of material never published before, revealing some new themes: the more extreme scatological and taboo-breaching songs and rhymes the Opies collected; the wide range of variations on ‘classic’ singing games and many examples of the media influences that informed the culture of play. These new themes form the subject of Chapter 2, in which Jopson, Burn and Robinson explore the significance of selected unpublished material in the archive.

We also added a wide variety of material from the ethnographic studies conducted during the project, which documented playground games in two playgrounds, in the UK cities of Sheffield and London. This material represents a sustained ethnographic investigation of playground play, including new games, songs and rhymes and the wider contexts of play.

We extended the archive beyond our original plans; contact with other researchers in this field became a very productive aspect of the project. Kathryn Marsh, of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and author of The Musical Playground (Marsh, 2008) visited the UK to give a seminar and act as discussant for our Interim Conference at the London Knowledge Lab. She subsequently generously donated her substantial collection of games and songs, from several different countries (including the UK), to our archive. Taken as a whole, then, this archive exceeded our original aims, promising to become an important international resource for future researchers. It combines historical depth, from the 1970s to the present day, with international reach, including games from Australia, the UK, America and Scandinavia.

The Ethnographic Study

The ethnographic studies were conducted over the two years of the project (April 2009 to May 2011) in our two partner primary schools. Monteney Primary School in Sheffield serves a working class community in the north west of the city and there are extensive grounds surrounding the school building. It had 450 pupils. Its most recent Ofsted² report noted that the school: ‘… is in an area of significant social and economic deprivation with above average levels of free school meals. The percentage of pupils with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is above average. Most pupils are from white British backgrounds and very few speak English as an additional language’ (Ofsted, 2007). Christopher Hatton Primary School is on the edge of the Clerkenwell district of London, serving a multiethnic community. During the project, the school was attended by 220 children, of whom about 40 per cent were entitled to free school meals. There were at least 20 ‘minority ethnic groups’, and about 68 per cent of the children were listed as coming from families in which the first language was not English. Indeed there were so many different languages among the school population that, on the whole, English prevailed as the common language in the playground. Nevertheless, there were occasional instances of younger children using Bengali and, from discussions with children themselves, it was apparent that, often, their home language was a significant and continuing aspect of their self-identities. For some, linguistic identifications were also entwined with refugee status (about 26 per cent of the school population).

The ethnographic research recorded many instances of games, songs and rhymes recognisable as latter-day versions of the Opie ‘repertoire’, demonstrating continuity as well as change. Versions of many of the clapping games published in The Singing Game were found, as well as examples of counting-out rhymes, skipping games, chasing games and ball games. At the same time, it was clear that some genres had diminished: hopscotch, conkers and French skipping, for example (though reports of hopscotch were documented on the Sheffield playground). But we also found many new instances of play, in particular a rich variety of play informed by children’s media cultures (computer games, reality TV, pop songs, musicals and films) and pretend play enacting scenarios which often intermingled domestic and fantasy settings: families, superheroes, fairies, witches and zombies. The relationship between playground play and children’s media cultures is explored in Chapter 5, in which Jackie Marsh considers the connection between children’s online and offline play; and Chapter 6, in which Rebekah Willett analyses the forms and functions of media references in playground games. Where possible, we also considered the wider social and institutional framing of play enacted, and regulated, in closely supervised school playgrounds. There was evidence, for example, that some forms of play – those regarded as rough or as resembling real world violence – were the focus of considerable adult anxiety and concern. These enduring, but also heightened, adult misgivings are discussed by Chris Richards in Chapter 4.

We conducted surveys of the children in the two schools, partly to get a sense of the favourite games of all the children (rather than just the ones who were filmed or interviewed); and partly to get a picture of the media cultures that lie beyond the playground, in children’s media consumption at home. Julia Bishop and Jackie Marsh, in Sheffield, and Chris Richards and Rebekah Willett, in London, also worked with panels of children representing all the ages and classes in each school. The intention was to work with the children as researchers, giving them Flip video cameras to record their own play and interview their fellow students. This approach acknowledged children as social actors able to play an active role in projects relating to their cultural worlds (James and Prout, 1990). The videos collected by the children added substantially to those made by the researchers.

Fig. 1.1 Children playing a ring game “Rosy apples, lemon & a pear”, Leyland gas works, Lancashire, Oct 1967. Photograph by Fr. Damian Webb. Copyright and courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum [2003.88.2594]

The Website: Playtimes: A Century of Children’s Playground Games and Rhymes

The website was intended to display selections from the Opie archive alongside samples of play video-recorded in the two schools, in order to represent the historical changes and continuities evident across the Opie collection and today’s playgrounds. In the event, we discovered new material which significantly enhanced the content of the website, such as archive film from the British Film Institute, expanding the historical scope of the site to the century indicated in its title. Most importantly, we collaborated with the Bodleian Libraries University of Oxford, to whom the Opies donated their manuscript archive; and the Pitt Rivers museum, University of Oxford, which holds an important collection of the photographer Father Damian Webb. The Bodleian collection provided valuable examples of written accounts of games sent by children and teachers to the Opies; while the Damian Webb collection provided examples of high-quality audio recordings from the mid-twentieth century, as well as strikingly beautiful black-and-white photographs of children at play (Figure 1.1).

The design of the website proved to be an innovative form of library exhibition, especially in terms of the extensive consultation carried out with children in our partner schools (Figure 1.2). We held workshops with the panels of children in the schools and involved them in three ways: as researchers, designers and curators. They added significantly to the research and collection of their own games, making their own videos and interviews. They contributed concept drawings for the visual design and navigational structure of the website. They produced animations introducing the nine categories of play in the children’s route through the site, serving as a form of curatorial interpretation (Potter, 2009). The nature of these forms of research, (re)presentation and interpretation are considered by John Potter in Chapter 8, employing the metaphor of curation to theorise the voice of the child in these processes.

Fig. 1 2 The children’s home page of the Playtimes site - Design by Bjorn Rune Lie

The Game Catcher Prototype

The Game Catcher adapts the motion sensitive videogame controllers of the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect to create an application which allows the recording, playback, archiving and analysis of playground games in 3D. Chapter 7, by Grethe Mitchell, considers the relationship between playground games and the movement-based games of platforms such as Wii and Kinect, both in terms of their ludic structures and in terms of their location in children’s cultural lives.

The Game Catcher had two main aims. One was to develop a proof of concept of a system which would provide researchers in the arts and humanities with new and improved ways of archiving and analysing movement-based activities. The archiving of playground games currently relies upon video (or previously, as in the Opie and Webb collections, upon audio recording supplemented by still photographs). These provide an incomplete record – even video only records the events from a single viewpoint and can therefore leave details obscured or off-screen. The Game Catcher avoids these shortcomings by recording the position in 3D space of every major joint of the body. By recording the raw movement data and attaching it to a three-dimensional model or figure, the movement can be animated and viewed from any angle in ‘real time’ and at various frame-speeds. In addition, other alternative forms of visualisation – for instance tracing the path taken by the hands throughout the entire game – also become possible.

In parallel with this, the Game Catcher had a second aim, which was to develop a new and innovative type of computer game. This exercise was partly intended as a form of cultural intervention. We have seen how, in popular discourse, ‘traditional’ games and songs are often opposed to electronic or computer games which are seen to embody suspect, sedentary forms of play. By developing a computer game version of a playground clapping game, we were able to explore the tensions between these fields, as well as the areas for overlap and both actual and potential synergies. Clapping games were chosen because they contain fast movement within a constrained physical space, thereby offering a suitable level of technical challenge.

There was also some evidence in the ethnographic studies that experiences of computer games migrated into physical games on the playground. The Game Catcher reverses this process, asking what it would be like for physical games to become computer games. Although children’s media play is often seen as distinct from and even antagonistic to what are perceived as more traditional forms of play. These traditional forms are in many ways similar to the way in which play is structured in computer games. They are routinised, formulaic, rule-governed, finely balanced between accessibility and challenge and often incorporate narrative elements.

The children’s panels were involved in testing prototype versions, experimenting with different kinds of movements both related to games and to other forms such as dance; and making suggestions for further development of the prototype. The Game Catcher was developed with open source software and is written in the programming language Processing.

The Documentary Film

The documentary film Ipi-dipi-dation, My Generation, made by Grethe Mitchell, draws on ethnographic and observational methods and provides a detailed overview of playground culture and the diversity of play in the two primary school playgrounds in London and Sheffield. In doing so it follows in the tradition of filmic and photographic records of children’s gam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Children’s Playground Games in the New Media Age
• 2 The Opie Recordings: What’s Left to be Heard?
• 3 ‘That’s how the whole hand-clap thing passes on’: Online/Offline Transmission and Multimodal Variation in a Children’s Clapping Game
• 4 Rough Play, Play Fighting and Surveillance: School Playgrounds as Sites of Dissonance, Controversy and Fun
• 5 The Relationship between Online and Offline Play: Friendship and Exclusion
• 6 Remixing Children’s Cultures: Media-Referenced Play on the Playground
• 7 The Game Catcher: A Computer Game and Research Tool for Embodied Movement
• 8 Co-Curating Children’s Play Cultures
• Postscript: The People in the Playground
• Index