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Games people (or stupid kids) play

Posted By Scott Warnock On In virtual children by Scott Warnock | 9 Comments

Like any good parent in 2014, I have encouraged my kids to make up their own games. I want them to devise their own stories. I want them to escape the prescriptive screen narratives that increasingly make up the bulk of their play reality. However, I ruined it all when I unfortunately disclosed some of the games my friends and I once played. Let’s just say times may not have changed, but something’s certainly different about how my kids are proceeding along.

Some games I described were common enough when I was young, but I just don’t see kids playing them as much anymore, like Kill the man. Aside from a name that wouldn’t pass muster in today’s schools, perhaps the takeover of football by soccer has left us largely Kill the man-less. It was easy, though: A bunch of kids. One football. One kid gets the ball. The others try to tackle him. Simple. Clean. Impossible to win. Painful.

Or Jarts, which disappeared from the backyard landscape long ago [1]. I want to rant here about our hypersecure culture, but, c’mon, these things were crazy dangerous. You tossed these metal missiles into the air, supposedly aiming for a small plastic ring. How could you not aim for each other? Or try to throw them as high as you could to see, well, what would happen? Here’s what would happen: My friend Pete tossed one up and it came down right through our brand-new gutters, directly in front of a window. Yes, it coulda been worse, but we became good at getting out of the way.

Looking back, for some reason, many (most? all?) of these games involved some flirting with pain. Beaterball was another one. One Nerf net. One Nerf ball. One rule: Score. Again: you could do anything to score or prevent scoring. One highlight: My friend Blair, who was super tall even then, going for an atomic dunk and dragging his knuckles for a looonggg time on our stuccoed ceiling, leaving a bloody trail. If memory serves, he scored.

Or Wiffleball bat toss. Pete and I (good old Pete!), after having been ourselves tossed out of the house yet again by his mom, would stand about 60 feet apart from each other, standing between two trees that served as goals. We each had two wiffleball bats. You scored a goal by throwing a bat through the other guy’s goal. You could, of course, use the bats to block as well. It got rough if you ended up with no bats at one point. Then you only had your arms, legs, and… head.

I’m not falsely packaging here, telling my children these were healthy pursuits, especially our constant conversion of all things into contests of fortitude and, again, suffering. Trivial beating, for instance. It was Trivial Pursuit, but there was a kind of switch/stick involved (once it was a hollow plastic tube). You didn’t want to get an answer wrong.

These games were often pointless, like Dart blanket. You wrapped yourself up in a bunch of blankets. The other guy would throw darts at you. Usually, no aiming for the head — what were we, savages?

The hopeless, lovely randomness of it all. Find the hole. This was a Warnock backyard classic. If memory serves, for several summers we’d dig a big hole in our backyard. Why? Because it had to be done. It normally ended up being about 24 cubic feet: 4x3x3. Eventually, Find the hole was born. You’d put on a blindfold. Then the other players would guide you around the yard by voice until you found the hole – the hard way.

Then there was Hide the belt: I may not have actually played this game, but it’s too good to leave out: You hide a belt. Everyone looks for it. When someone finds it, he gets to whip everyone else until they get back to base. Simple. Clean. Pure.

My kids have been overt in their opinions of these games. They think we were stupid. They may be right, but they wouldn’t have made it in old Berlin, NJ.

They still need their own games. I recently thought of one for them, a new game: Lollipop loosener. You each have a lollipop in your mouth. You take turns smacking each other until one of you knocks the lollipop out.

They have yet to play it.

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Scott Warnock [5]

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.
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