The phenomenon under
discussion presently is the lack of ritual in the school yard and its associ-
ated lack of transition at game's end.
discussion presently is the lack of ritual in the school yard and its associ-
ated lack of transition at game's end.
Childens - Folklore
"Turning" and "crissing"
involved the most skill and only the most advanced jumpers were able to
do those steps. Taisha, a particularly graceful fifth grader, was known to add
turns to all of her steps, in every sequence, just for the challenge of it.
THEMES OF THE JUMP-ROPE TEXTS
Much like the world of themes found in the children's riddling studied by
John McDowell (1979), the recorded texts of the rope games were spheres
of the African American girls' culture. There were "1,2,3 Halleluya" and
"Hey, D. J. , let's sing that song," and "Boom Boom Tangle"-a rhyme about
rap artists. Plus there were "All in Together," "Hey Consolation, Where Have
You Been," "Girlscout, Girlscout, Do Your Duty," "Juice Juice, Let's Knock
Some Boots," "D-I-S-H Choice, Do Your Footsies," "Challenge, Challenge
1,2,3," and "Kitty Cat Come, Gonna Be on Time, Cause the School Bell
Rings at A Quarter to Nine. " But these themes, the ones of religion, region,
pop music, of group entry and exit, schooling, and even of plain step dis-
play in menu form, were out-shouted by "Big Mac," a commercial for the
McDonald's Corporation.
As Cheyna, a fourth-grade African American girl had said, "Want to
hear my favorite? " (Snap fingers on down beat. Accented syllables are capi-
talized)
Big MAC, Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE,
Milk SHAKE, Foot
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
SHAKE,
BOUNCE
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
HOP
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
TURN
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
CRISS
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? ? Big Mac appeared in twenty-three out of fifty-six live unrequested
recordings of double dutch chants, closely followed by a follow-the-leader
game, "Challenge Challenge, One, Two, Three. " This contrasted with the
rest of the active repetoire, of which two or three versions were recorded of
each. First observed in mid-October, "Big Mac," and its occasional partner
"Challenge Challenge," were the only chants jumped at recess until Febru-
ary. Most of the other rhymes did not appear at all until April. "Big Mac"
represented forty percent of all the songs sung for double dutch, with "Chal-
lenge Challenge" representing thirty percent. The remainder totaled three to
six percent, tallying another thirty percent. "Big Mac" was therefore not only
the first jump-rope rhyme to appear in the school yard and not only the most
frequently jumped, but, as we will see, also the one used for learning how
to play the game of double dutch itself.
Collectors of jump-rope games have typically emphasized the antiq-
uity of the games and rhymes, in part because of the archive methodology
available, as discussed, and in part because of the inherent romance in find-
ing things old. Paradoxically, the most significant rhyme for the players of
this game was the newest one, invented by the McDonald's Corporation as
a menu chant. Again and again the local jump-rope experts-the third-,
fourth-, and fifth-grade girls-claimed that the "Big Mac" rhyme was com-
mercial and approximately ten years old, but that the game was learned from
their mothers and sisters. The dating of this particular chant was confirmed
by the national public-relations office of the McDonald's Corporation, which
indicated that the menu chants are periodically placed in local papers as part
of a contest. It is significant that McDonald's has been a national sponsor
of double dutch competitions since the late 1970s and that the only other
long commercial text that emerged was in an interview setting: This was
"R-E-E-B-O-K do your footsies the Reebok way. " Reebok is also a national
sponsor of double dutch competitions.
All of the new attempts at double dutch recorded in the school yard
were done to the "Big Mac" rhyme. When Isha, a fifth-grade expert jumper,
was asked what was the easiest rhyme, she answered, "Challenge Challenge,"
because "you just had to imitate what was done before you. " When asked
why the younger girls and the ones new to double dutch started with "Big
Mac," she answered, "Because they don't have nothing else. " Commercial
culture is, for the kids of the school yard, the most basic of common culture.
The commercial is easily learned: It's short, it's quick, and it's "fun
in the mouth. " Children who are bused in from all sections of the city know
it, and children from all economic levels have access to it. It may have been
introduced by the corporate-sponsored leagues and ad campaigns and may
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? ? be a future classic example of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1983), but it would not have continued if it did not serve some func-
tion. Adam Kendon, in his book Conducting Interaction (1990), talks about
"movement coordination in social interaction" and the use of ritual to fa-
cilitate synchrony. The sound bytes of "Big Mac" may well serve to speed
up the ritualization of entry into the game in a recess period that allows only
fifteen minutes for play in this city.
In an environment where raw materials are inaccessible and consis-
tently removed from the play time, it appears that the African American
children from poorer neighborhoods, rich with an oral tradition, are teach-
ing non-African Americans what can be done, as Isha says, "when you don't
have nothing else. " This is especially true of the play of girls, which is par-
ticularly repressed in the school yard by the institution of school itself. Here
it is commercial culture that is the common denominator, both within an
ethnic tradition and across ethnic traditions.
One of the most relevant texts on this topic is Newell's 1883 book
Games and Songs of American Children. His essays "The Inventiveness of
Children" and "The Conservatism of Children" address the dynamics in-
herent in play study, the idea of play as being both traditional and transi-
tional, and the idea that children reconstruct and reinvent performances rel-
evant to their complex lives. The key word is relevant. Valuable things are
reused and recycled and retold. And as we will see, the repetition of the com-
mercial rhyme may be fixed, but the variation and creativity in the game can
be found in the foot work. In a sense, the folklorist begins with the text, but
cannot stop there.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTIONS OF DOUBLE DUTCH
The following are transcriptions of actual footage of the "Big Mac" game,
filmed on two days in the spring of 1992. The clips are unique in that they
capture two incidences of non-African American girls participating in the
African American tradition of rope jumping. The first example is the first
time R. , a European American third grader, actually got a chance to jump,
although she had been a turner of single rope African American games pre-
viously. The second example is an overt lesson in the art of double dutch
itself, as given by African American girls to an immigrant girl from Hong
Kong, and also to a Polish American girl.
The transcriptions show a basic diagram of the rope, and list a run-
ning time imprinted on the videotape in hours, minutes, and seconds. In this
manner the transcript reflects specific frames of videotape and can be cross-
referenced by time. The cross referencing of tapes by time turned out to be
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? ? rather significant and is a topic to which the concluding pages will be devoted.
The action is described in the middle column, and the audible con-
versation and game text is listed in the right-hand column. Following the
principle, but not the style, of Ray Birdwhistell's kinesics, and Adam
Kendon's studies of nonverbal communication, it was considered important
to at least describe the basic body motion as a line of communication sepa-
rate from the speech (Birdwhistell 1970; Kendon 1981). Actual kinesic tran-
scriptions, from Birdwhistell to Laban, have proved too complex for most
readers and, in a sense, give us more detail than is necessary for this level of
analysis. (For an example of Laban's system of movement notation, see
Hutchinson 1977). The advantage of video ethnography is that the footage
is there to be reanalyzed over time, as more and more detailed levels of analy-
sis become of interest. (For more on the recent attention given to the body
in folklore studies, see Young 1993. )
Example A: The Single Rope Version of "Big Mac"
In the following transcription there is a demonstration of non-double dutch
and double double dutch styles utilizing a single rope. Third- and second-
grade girls Q. , V. , and S. , all African American, and European American girl,
R. , took turns jumping. One to two singers sang as they jumped without
doing any particular steps. A more experienced jumper joined in and the two
jumped at once, facing each other, laughing. The last jumper performed the
"Big Mac" steps and sang all the way from foot to criss, with a stop in the
middle. She was angry when another girl tried to do joint jumping with her.
They jumped past the honking bell, and this episode ended angrily when she
was interrupted by another attempt at joint jumping.
Diagram Time (Action) Voices
10:40:15 (Q. jumps single rope, (no singing)
both feet, not double
dutch style)
10:40:27 (R. gets a turn, jumps,
same way)
10:40:29 (A second African
American girl, V. , jumps
in; they stop)
10:40:30 (R. again jumps)
10:40:36 (Joint jumping of
R. and V. ) and V.
"No, no,no"
Laughter of R.
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? ? 10:40:38
10:40:43
10:40:51
(R. tries again)
(S. begins turn)
(S. sings to herself)
(jumps non-d-d style)
10:41:02 [school bell rings]
10:41:04 (V. jumps in to joint
jump)
(A. , a turner, yells)
(S. gets angry,
starts again. )
(S. does required
motions)
"Hey come on! "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries,
ice coke, milk
shake, foot"
(Sound of bell,
screams)
"No, don't
jump in. "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, turn
quarter
pounder,
french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, criss"
10:41:17 (V. jumps in;
they miss.
S. gets angry.
R. tries to
collect the rope)
There were several variations from the typical game here, reminding
us that no game really is typical. The text itself was varied and began with
"Quarter pounder, french fries," creating an even syncopation of the usual
rhyme, making it slightly easier for this younger player. The format itself was
different as a single rope, not a double rope, was being used. The style was
different, as both before and after the double dutch style was being jumped
a second player attempted to do joint jumping. And the intensity of the game
itself was shaped by the honking of the bell.
Example B: The Double Rope Version of "Big Mac"
Here we have a distinct double dutch lesson, utilizing two ropes. Second-
through sixth-grade girls, all African American, were instructing a Polish
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? ? American and immigrant girl from Hong Kong in the art of double dutch.
Neither got very far, and the sixth grader instructing them had the others
learn by standing in the middle of the ropes while trying to turn in a way
that made it easy for them. The rope itself was flimsy and the wind was
strong. As each got stuck, a young girl in the front jumped up and down
shouting "Saved! Saved! " indicating that she had gone farther than these
older girls in the overall competition. When the bell rang, there was much
shrieking and shaking, and the young immigrant from Hong Kong was
knocked over and began to cry.
Diagram
Time
(Action)
Voices
10:46:50
10:47:01
10:47:05
10:47:12
10:47:15
(K. , a second-grade
Chinese immigrant
is trying to learn
double dutch) "Big Mac
fillet fish"
(she misses)
(Second-grade African
American girl, who
has ends, dances, turns
to her audience, and
points out) "Saved! Saved! "
(Three second graders
dance in place)
(Polish American sixth
grader, enters)
(She is told, nonverbally,
to stand in the middle
and lift her feet in place.
She does. The other turn-
er, her instructor, also a
sixth grader, is checking
to see which rope should
be raised first)
[Off camera] "One, two,
three. "
(Girl steps in place, Sixth grader says,
in the middle of the "Do it again. "
rope; fourth grader
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? ? on side nods that the
right side should be
turned first)
10:47:20 (She jumps high,
both feet together, "Big Mac"
and misses)
Instructor says "I
told you not to
come down! "
10:47: 27 [School bell rings] (honk)
(Girls jump up and
down. A nearby boy
jumps in front of the
camera and shakes his
whole body. The Chinese
girl gets knocked over. )
Of interest in this clip is the capturing of cultural transmission from
ethnicity to ethnicity, something undiscussed in the literature of the school
yard, and also of the banging of one culture-school yard culture-into that
of school instructional time (Pellegrini 1987; Hart 1993). The video cam-
era captured not only the teaching of the game, and the competitive reac-
tion of many of the players as they gauged their relative status, but the con-
text of the school yard and how it affected the players themselves. The vis-
ible time stress at the ringing of the bell, which caused one observer to shake
while another player was knocked over, thus emphasizes the utility of using
a popular culture rhyme, such as Big Mac, for the sake of quick negotia-
tion. At the same time, this also indicates the need to examine the reasons
for the bell as a significant part of the game itself.
Both video clips captured variation in game text, language specific
to the game, and examples of direct and indirect instruction. Both indicate
that there is something about the timing of the ringing of the bell that shapes
the game and the interaction around it and that can be said to be unique to
the culture of the school yard.
BEYOND THE GAME: THE SECOND CAMERA
In order to make sense of patterns across these games, we can compare simi-
lar transcripts, as we did above, and then also comb through the footage of
the wide-angle camera. With this survey of the macro footage, an interest-
ing larger pattern emerged.
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? ? Consistently, at the end of the recess period, violent interactions were
visible on the wide-angle screen. In glimpses from the micro footage, one
can clearly see a definite rippling of anger, kicking, punching, and fighting
during the transition back to the classroom. Typically within two minutes
of the ringing of the bell, an almost palpable tension is trackable. In the
macro footage alone, eight out of nine sample tapes showed distinctly vio-
lent conflict in the lining up transition, with six out of the eight violent in-
teractions occurring less than one minute before the bell, and the other two
occurring within two minutes of the bell. In more than half of the micro foot-
age, taken of a variety of games, there are incidences, indirectly captured,
of real fighting or direct violence. And, in all of these images, with only one
exception, the tension occurs within a minute and a half of the ringing of
the bell.
Victor Turner, symbolic anthropologist, has spent much of his career
analyzing the liminal, in-between moments in rites of passage in tribal cul-
tures (Turner 1974a). Although some attention has been paid to transitions
in the sociology of face-to-face communication as studied by Goffman, the
attention of folklorists to transitional times has been minimal. Some atten-
tion has been paid in the folk game literature to opening rituals like count-
ing out rhymes (Goldstein 1971; Opie and Opie 1969; Sluckin 1981; Sutton-
Smith 1981a), but these are usually viewed as pregame ceremonies, rituals
designed for the facilitation of games' beginnings.
The phenomenon under
discussion presently is the lack of ritual in the school yard and its associ-
ated lack of transition at game's end.
The second camera allows us to see how the context shapes the game,
beyond the interaction around the text. The study of the one genre, then,
leads to the understanding of the ecology of the larger context. The advan-
tage of extended ethnographic fieldwork in one place is that it allows us to
see the significance of the place on the game, and the patterning over time.
Superficial folk-game surveys that are panoramic mask larger contextual is-
sues and indeed the crossing of ethnic boundaries, which are perhaps only
visible over time. It was apparent that the children needed the entire school
year to reach a point of intimacy with each other, as well as the researcher's
needing that much time to observe the big picture in that place.
BEYOND THE CAMERA
The camera is seductive, as it seems to provide a form of documentation with
less debate and more data. Yet, even when the editing is kept to a minimum
and the shots are taken at the widest angle possible, no camera is objective.
It too is the manifestation of decisions made by the photographer, ranging
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? ? from angle to height to light to the very decision as to when the tape begins
and ends. The goal is not to present a new objectivity in folk game presen-
tation, but rather to present the performances on the film or video back to
as many participants as possible in order to collect yet more stories about
the folk games as cultural markers.
When the adults at the Mill School viewed the above clips, several
of the staff responded that the tapes were "too happy" and performance
oriented, and many shared that they had never observed anything but "mis-
behavior" during recess. Many of the staff did become nostalgic about the
games they had played during their childhoods; they noticed that although
some were the same, many were different with new and different rules. The
comment about misbehavior is significant, given that the staff generally had
the opportunity to come to the school yard only in the last few minutes of
recess, which I have documented as the time of most conflict. They indeed
missed all the constructive cultural expressiveness and sharing that occurs
in the earlier parts of the play period.
When the third- through fifth-grade girls, both African American and
European American, viewed the clips, their reaction was delight, pride, and
outright laughter. For several it was an opportunity to reflect upon their own
process of learning how to "do double dutch. " For Tanya, a fifth grader, it
was a chance to comment on the misdirection of the above double dutch
lesson. She had been taught to enter the ropes and begin by jumping in near
the ends. In the above clip, the immigrant child from Hong Kong and, later,
the Polish American girl, were being instructed in the middle of the rope,
with the rope being turned from a stationary position around the jumper.
This was considered to be much more difficult, indicating that there is an
acknowledged art to instruction as well as performance.
Tanya, like many of her expert double dutch friends, started learn-
ing "how to jump" when she was six or seven years old. Her training, like
theirs, was intensely visual and often meant observation without direct par-
ticipation. "I started in like, first, or second grade, got to be first or second,
because my, I never knew how to jump, but my cousin was in, my cousin
was in the eighth grade and my cous used to always play rope, and I used
to always jump in they (sic) rope, and they used to get mad at me, and kick
me back to my line. " For Rica, an African American fourth grader, the pro-
cess also involved the observation of older girls, and had to do with her
"catching on" to the new songs. "This is how I learn because when people,
like older people start jumping, yeah, like I catched on to the song, like
Tamisha's sister, she'd be singing all these bunch of songs I don't know. And
the next (day) they'd have two of them. "
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? ? If we are going to be able to understand the process of the transmis-
sion of culture within the boundaries of one place, such as the school yard,
as well as across the boundaries of that place, and across time, such reflec-
tions can be most insightful. The study of children as tradition bearers within
an ethnic tradition and in a multiethnic setting sheds light on children's folk-
lore as an area of cultural study, and not just cultural collection. Their pro-
cess is more than aural, it is kinesthetic and intensely visual, and our pro-
cess as fieldworkers can parallel it.
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? ?
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? ? 5 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
Linda A. Hughes
Most studies of children's folk culture are based on collecting and analyz-
ing items of folklore like rhymes, jokes, riddles, and games. Few describe
or analyze the ways children use their folklore, or how its form and func-
tion vary across social contexts (J. Evans 1986; Factor 1988). In this chap-
ter, I explore some important conceptual and methodological issues involved
in shifting the focus from collecting children's folk games to describing how
children play them, and contrast the very different images of children that
can emerge from these two types of studies. I will focus first on developing
a model of game rules that allows players to mold their games to the de-
mands of social life in particular settings, and, second, on adopting the play
episode, not the game, as the basic unit of analysis.
GAMES AND GAMING
Kenneth Goldstein (1971) long ago demonstrated that there can be significant
differences between the characterizations of children's folk games and the ac-
tual games. In his observations of children playing counting-out games such
as the "game of chance," Goldstein recorded a range of familiar practices that
were not consistent with common characterizations of the game (Roberts and
Sutton-Smith 1962). In fact, much of what Goldstein observed, such as choos-
ing rhymes with different numbers of beats depending on the number of players
and tagging on additional rhymes if the initial outcome was not the one they
wanted, appeared to be designed to minimize the role of chance in determin-
ing outcomes. Their activity, he argued, was as much a "game of strategy" as
of chance. And to Goldstein that made a difference in how we analyze this
game, and especially in how we characterize the experiences and skills of its
players. It led him to caution that "the rules which are verbalized by infor-
mants and which are then presented by collectors in their papers and books
for our analysis and study are. . , the rules by which people should play rather
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? ? than the ones by which they do play" (Goldstein 1971, 90). Few studies of
children's folk culture since have heeded this caution.
Denzin (1977) and Fine (1983) have proposed the term gaming to
describe the processes by which players mold and modulate the raw mate-
rials of their games into actual play. This is not simply a matter of creating
variants of the rules of a particular game, as many folklorists have assumed.
The same rules can also be understood and used in qualitatively different
ways by different groups of players. As Maynard (1985, 22) has observed,
"[T]he way a rule is used in a group may be more important than the con-
tent of the rule in describing a local group's culture . . . [C]ultural objects
[including rules] need to be approached not by way of previously established
content but by way of how they emerge and function in the communication
patterns of a particular group. " Game rules can be interpreted and reinter-
preted toward preferred meanings and purposes, selectively invoked or ig-
nored, challenged or defended, changed or enforced to suit the collective
goals of different groups of players. In short, players can take the same game
and collectively make of it strikingly different experiences. '
The conceptual and methodological framework I will be developing
approaches children's folk games not as sets of game rules, but as highly situ-
ated social contexts in which real players collectively construct a complex and
richly textured communal experience. I will begin by describing three differ-
ent rule systems that are implicated whenever games are actually played: game
rules, social rules, and higher-order gaming rules governing the interplay be-
tween game structure and social process. I will then contrast several qualities
of games with qualities of the social episodes in which they are embedded in
the playing. Throughout, I will draw on my own observations of how one
group of girls played the common ball-bouncing game foursquare to illustrate
implications of the framework being developed for actual studies of child cul-
ture. A brief description of this study can be found in the appendix.
GAME RULES, SOCIAL RULES, AND GAMING RULES
The study of children's gaming begins with the assumption that most games
in the playing, and certainly the vast majority of folk games in childhood,
are, as Goldstein (1971) suggests, something more than a listing of their rules.
They are richly textured, and highly situated instances of social life. Play-
ing games is something of a very different order than describing them (Collett
1977), and it always requires that players know something more than the
rules of the game.
To play competently and well, for example, players usually need at
least some degree of physical or strategic skill (Avedon 1971). They also need
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? ? social knowledge and skill, however, and it is this aspect that will be of pri-
mary concern here. Players incorporate general cultural knowledge about
such things as fairness, cheating, and being a good sport or a team player
into their playing. They also display a more situated social/interactional com-
petence (Speier 1976) or knowledge about such things as initiating and sus-
taining complex interactional sequences, and generating and regulating ap-
propriate, responsible group conduct.
A primary goal of gaming studies is to describe how the social worlds
of players are integrated with the stated demands of particular games to gen-
erate qualitatively different versions of the same activity. They are concerned,
therefore, with at least three primary domains of meaning: the rules of the
game (the game text), the rules of the social world in which that game is
embedded in the playing (the social context), and the additional domain of
shared understandings that is generated out of the interaction between game
structure and social process in particular times and places (gaming rules).
Gaming rules are not of the same logical type (Bateson 1972) as ei-
ther game rules or social rules. They are higher order "rules for rules"
(Shimanoff 1980) that derive from the need to manage and negotiate the
interplay between the game and other contexts of everyday life (Collett
1977). They consist, among other things, of shared understandings about
(1) when and how the rules of the game ought to be applied, ignored, or
modified; (2) which of many possible interpretations is most appropriately
applied to specific instances of the same or very similar actions; (3) which
of many possible courses of action is to be preferred over others in particu-
lar circumstances; and (4) what are the limits and consequences of accept-
able conduct in the game. 2
Gaming rules, like other rules of the social world, have a critical evalu-
ative dimension, and this is reflected in phrases like "ought to be," "pre-
ferred" and "acceptable. " We often judge some ways of accomplishing the
same ends to be qualitatively different (nice or mean, fair or unfair, respect-
ful or disrespectful), and to view some of them as more or less acceptable
or appropriate in particular contexts (Fine 1987; Roberts 1987). This qual-
ity is a major methodological concern in studies of children's gaming.
All of this implies, as Goldstein (1971) proposed, that what players
do when they play games is not fully described by reference to the rules of
the game. This runs counter to the commonsense view that rules, and per-
haps especially game rules, tell us what we can and cannot do, and thus needs
to be explored in greater detail. In the following section, I will outline an
alternative way of thinking about rules, including game rules, that permits
the kinds of interpretation and negotiation that characterizes episodes of
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? ? social life like playing a game.
RULES AND RULES FOR RULES
We commonly think of rules, and perhaps especially game rules, as being
rather rigid and explicit, as primarily prescriptive and proscriptive in func-
tion (Shimanoff 1980). This contrasts with the perspective commonly
adopted by those who describe social life in terms of rules, and who think
of rules as highly ambiguous, largely implicit, and essentially productive or
generative in function (Harre and Secord 1972; Hymes 1980; Shwayder
1965). The former conception, which has appropriately characterized most
studies of games, emphasizes the many ways rules confine the range of ac-
tions available to players. The latter conception, however, stresses how rules
help us choose among the many possible courses of action available to us
in the course of everyday life (Brenner 1982; Gruneau 1980). It rests upon
an analogy with the grammatical rules of language, which do not explicitly
and rigidly determine each and every utterance we make, but instead guide
our construction of novel yet meaningful and appropriate action. 3
Game rules do strongly shape what happens within a particular game.
To borrow from Goffman (1959) and Burke (1945), game rules typically set
a scene by identifying an appropriate setting, a set of necessary props, and
game roles. They then outline a sequence of game action, which is usually
cyclical and repetitive (L. Hughes 1983, 1989). At another level, game rules
also create distinctive domains of meaning (placing a ball in a hoop, for ex-
ample, has particular meaning within the context of a game of basketball),
and specify a typically nonpragmatic relationship between means and ends
(one does not approach the task by using a ladder).
Game rules still leave substantial areas of ambiguity, however, and a
central task in gaming studies is to describe players' perceptions of areas of
ambiguity and how they go about managing them. Game rules do not rig-
idly and explicitly specify each and every move in the game or, as Goffman
(1974, 24) observes, "establish where we are to travel or why we should
want to, . . . [they are] merely the restraints we are to observe in getting
there. " One does not, as Shwayder (1965, 243) notes, "succeed in getting
into a certain chess position by following the rules of chess. " There are many
ways of accomplishing the same ends within the general "restraints" of the
rules (Brenner 1982; Collett 1977; Gruneau 1980).
There is also another very important sense in which game rules pro-
vide an ambiguous framework for player action. In the social world, we
do not respond simply and objectively to what people do, but rather on
the basis of what we take actions and events to mean (Harre and Secord
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? ? 1972). Translated into the world of gaming, this means that while game
rules may tell us what we can and cannot do, they do not also tell us what
is to count as an instance of that "doing" (Brenner 1982; Harre 1977).
The same or very similar actions can be taken to mean very different things
to different players and in different contexts of occurrence. This is perhaps
the most central tenet of the study of children's gaming. It can be illustrated,
however, in the most formal of gaming contexts, professional sports. "(Na-
tional Hockey League) referees must have an instinct for which violations
to call and which to ignore. They themselves talk of 'good' penalties (fla-
grant violations such as tripping the player with the puck) and 'bad' ones
(minor offenses such as hooking a player who doesn't have the puck late
in a tight game). 'You could call a penalty a minute,' says referee Ron
Fournier. 'But that's not what we're supposed to do. You call a guy for a
minor infraction and even though you cite the rule number, he just looks
at you and says, "What's that? " It doesn't earn you respect'" (Shah 1981,
emphasis added).
Competent hockey players and referees are clearly expected to know
what a "hook" is, and what are the rules about "hooking. " But they are
just as clearly expected to know that all "hooks" are not to be understood
or responded to in the same way. These types of understandings are often
implicit (thus the appeal to an "instinct," not to the rule book for hockey),
they are subject to choice and evaluation ("You could. . , but that's not what
we're supposed to do"), and they lead to social, rather than game-prescribed,
consequences (the referee just cited is concerned about winning or losing
"respect," not about winning or losing the game). All of these qualities are
clear markers of gaming rules.
Children make similar distinctions. The players I observed responded
very differently to the same move in different contexts of performance, and
they recognized important differences between what you could do under the
game rules and what you were supposed to do as a socially competent mem-
ber of a play group. Their actions in the game had clear social consequences
outside its bounds, and this strongly shaped the meaning of actions under
the rules of the game. Their treatment of the common act of "slamming the
ball" will illustrate.
In the game of foursquare, as in many other ball-bouncing games, a
"slam"4 is a hard bounce high over the receiving player's head. "Slams" are
difficult to return, and thus constitute one way players can try to eliminate
another player from the game. They were usually understood to be prohib-
ited by "the rules" among the players I observed.
Despite this prohibition, however, "slams" were very regularly used
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involved the most skill and only the most advanced jumpers were able to
do those steps. Taisha, a particularly graceful fifth grader, was known to add
turns to all of her steps, in every sequence, just for the challenge of it.
THEMES OF THE JUMP-ROPE TEXTS
Much like the world of themes found in the children's riddling studied by
John McDowell (1979), the recorded texts of the rope games were spheres
of the African American girls' culture. There were "1,2,3 Halleluya" and
"Hey, D. J. , let's sing that song," and "Boom Boom Tangle"-a rhyme about
rap artists. Plus there were "All in Together," "Hey Consolation, Where Have
You Been," "Girlscout, Girlscout, Do Your Duty," "Juice Juice, Let's Knock
Some Boots," "D-I-S-H Choice, Do Your Footsies," "Challenge, Challenge
1,2,3," and "Kitty Cat Come, Gonna Be on Time, Cause the School Bell
Rings at A Quarter to Nine. " But these themes, the ones of religion, region,
pop music, of group entry and exit, schooling, and even of plain step dis-
play in menu form, were out-shouted by "Big Mac," a commercial for the
McDonald's Corporation.
As Cheyna, a fourth-grade African American girl had said, "Want to
hear my favorite? " (Snap fingers on down beat. Accented syllables are capi-
talized)
Big MAC, Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE,
Milk SHAKE, Foot
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
SHAKE,
BOUNCE
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
HOP
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
TURN
Fillet FISH, Quarter POUNDer, French FRIES, Ice COKE, Milk
Shake,
CRISS
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? ? Big Mac appeared in twenty-three out of fifty-six live unrequested
recordings of double dutch chants, closely followed by a follow-the-leader
game, "Challenge Challenge, One, Two, Three. " This contrasted with the
rest of the active repetoire, of which two or three versions were recorded of
each. First observed in mid-October, "Big Mac," and its occasional partner
"Challenge Challenge," were the only chants jumped at recess until Febru-
ary. Most of the other rhymes did not appear at all until April. "Big Mac"
represented forty percent of all the songs sung for double dutch, with "Chal-
lenge Challenge" representing thirty percent. The remainder totaled three to
six percent, tallying another thirty percent. "Big Mac" was therefore not only
the first jump-rope rhyme to appear in the school yard and not only the most
frequently jumped, but, as we will see, also the one used for learning how
to play the game of double dutch itself.
Collectors of jump-rope games have typically emphasized the antiq-
uity of the games and rhymes, in part because of the archive methodology
available, as discussed, and in part because of the inherent romance in find-
ing things old. Paradoxically, the most significant rhyme for the players of
this game was the newest one, invented by the McDonald's Corporation as
a menu chant. Again and again the local jump-rope experts-the third-,
fourth-, and fifth-grade girls-claimed that the "Big Mac" rhyme was com-
mercial and approximately ten years old, but that the game was learned from
their mothers and sisters. The dating of this particular chant was confirmed
by the national public-relations office of the McDonald's Corporation, which
indicated that the menu chants are periodically placed in local papers as part
of a contest. It is significant that McDonald's has been a national sponsor
of double dutch competitions since the late 1970s and that the only other
long commercial text that emerged was in an interview setting: This was
"R-E-E-B-O-K do your footsies the Reebok way. " Reebok is also a national
sponsor of double dutch competitions.
All of the new attempts at double dutch recorded in the school yard
were done to the "Big Mac" rhyme. When Isha, a fifth-grade expert jumper,
was asked what was the easiest rhyme, she answered, "Challenge Challenge,"
because "you just had to imitate what was done before you. " When asked
why the younger girls and the ones new to double dutch started with "Big
Mac," she answered, "Because they don't have nothing else. " Commercial
culture is, for the kids of the school yard, the most basic of common culture.
The commercial is easily learned: It's short, it's quick, and it's "fun
in the mouth. " Children who are bused in from all sections of the city know
it, and children from all economic levels have access to it. It may have been
introduced by the corporate-sponsored leagues and ad campaigns and may
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? ? be a future classic example of the "invention of tradition" (Hobsbawm and
Ranger 1983), but it would not have continued if it did not serve some func-
tion. Adam Kendon, in his book Conducting Interaction (1990), talks about
"movement coordination in social interaction" and the use of ritual to fa-
cilitate synchrony. The sound bytes of "Big Mac" may well serve to speed
up the ritualization of entry into the game in a recess period that allows only
fifteen minutes for play in this city.
In an environment where raw materials are inaccessible and consis-
tently removed from the play time, it appears that the African American
children from poorer neighborhoods, rich with an oral tradition, are teach-
ing non-African Americans what can be done, as Isha says, "when you don't
have nothing else. " This is especially true of the play of girls, which is par-
ticularly repressed in the school yard by the institution of school itself. Here
it is commercial culture that is the common denominator, both within an
ethnic tradition and across ethnic traditions.
One of the most relevant texts on this topic is Newell's 1883 book
Games and Songs of American Children. His essays "The Inventiveness of
Children" and "The Conservatism of Children" address the dynamics in-
herent in play study, the idea of play as being both traditional and transi-
tional, and the idea that children reconstruct and reinvent performances rel-
evant to their complex lives. The key word is relevant. Valuable things are
reused and recycled and retold. And as we will see, the repetition of the com-
mercial rhyme may be fixed, but the variation and creativity in the game can
be found in the foot work. In a sense, the folklorist begins with the text, but
cannot stop there.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTIONS OF DOUBLE DUTCH
The following are transcriptions of actual footage of the "Big Mac" game,
filmed on two days in the spring of 1992. The clips are unique in that they
capture two incidences of non-African American girls participating in the
African American tradition of rope jumping. The first example is the first
time R. , a European American third grader, actually got a chance to jump,
although she had been a turner of single rope African American games pre-
viously. The second example is an overt lesson in the art of double dutch
itself, as given by African American girls to an immigrant girl from Hong
Kong, and also to a Polish American girl.
The transcriptions show a basic diagram of the rope, and list a run-
ning time imprinted on the videotape in hours, minutes, and seconds. In this
manner the transcript reflects specific frames of videotape and can be cross-
referenced by time. The cross referencing of tapes by time turned out to be
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? ? rather significant and is a topic to which the concluding pages will be devoted.
The action is described in the middle column, and the audible con-
versation and game text is listed in the right-hand column. Following the
principle, but not the style, of Ray Birdwhistell's kinesics, and Adam
Kendon's studies of nonverbal communication, it was considered important
to at least describe the basic body motion as a line of communication sepa-
rate from the speech (Birdwhistell 1970; Kendon 1981). Actual kinesic tran-
scriptions, from Birdwhistell to Laban, have proved too complex for most
readers and, in a sense, give us more detail than is necessary for this level of
analysis. (For an example of Laban's system of movement notation, see
Hutchinson 1977). The advantage of video ethnography is that the footage
is there to be reanalyzed over time, as more and more detailed levels of analy-
sis become of interest. (For more on the recent attention given to the body
in folklore studies, see Young 1993. )
Example A: The Single Rope Version of "Big Mac"
In the following transcription there is a demonstration of non-double dutch
and double double dutch styles utilizing a single rope. Third- and second-
grade girls Q. , V. , and S. , all African American, and European American girl,
R. , took turns jumping. One to two singers sang as they jumped without
doing any particular steps. A more experienced jumper joined in and the two
jumped at once, facing each other, laughing. The last jumper performed the
"Big Mac" steps and sang all the way from foot to criss, with a stop in the
middle. She was angry when another girl tried to do joint jumping with her.
They jumped past the honking bell, and this episode ended angrily when she
was interrupted by another attempt at joint jumping.
Diagram Time (Action) Voices
10:40:15 (Q. jumps single rope, (no singing)
both feet, not double
dutch style)
10:40:27 (R. gets a turn, jumps,
same way)
10:40:29 (A second African
American girl, V. , jumps
in; they stop)
10:40:30 (R. again jumps)
10:40:36 (Joint jumping of
R. and V. ) and V.
"No, no,no"
Laughter of R.
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? ? 10:40:38
10:40:43
10:40:51
(R. tries again)
(S. begins turn)
(S. sings to herself)
(jumps non-d-d style)
10:41:02 [school bell rings]
10:41:04 (V. jumps in to joint
jump)
(A. , a turner, yells)
(S. gets angry,
starts again. )
(S. does required
motions)
"Hey come on! "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries,
ice coke, milk
shake, foot"
(Sound of bell,
screams)
"No, don't
jump in. "
"Quarter pound-
er, french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, turn
quarter
pounder,
french fries
ice coke, milk
shake, criss"
10:41:17 (V. jumps in;
they miss.
S. gets angry.
R. tries to
collect the rope)
There were several variations from the typical game here, reminding
us that no game really is typical. The text itself was varied and began with
"Quarter pounder, french fries," creating an even syncopation of the usual
rhyme, making it slightly easier for this younger player. The format itself was
different as a single rope, not a double rope, was being used. The style was
different, as both before and after the double dutch style was being jumped
a second player attempted to do joint jumping. And the intensity of the game
itself was shaped by the honking of the bell.
Example B: The Double Rope Version of "Big Mac"
Here we have a distinct double dutch lesson, utilizing two ropes. Second-
through sixth-grade girls, all African American, were instructing a Polish
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? ? American and immigrant girl from Hong Kong in the art of double dutch.
Neither got very far, and the sixth grader instructing them had the others
learn by standing in the middle of the ropes while trying to turn in a way
that made it easy for them. The rope itself was flimsy and the wind was
strong. As each got stuck, a young girl in the front jumped up and down
shouting "Saved! Saved! " indicating that she had gone farther than these
older girls in the overall competition. When the bell rang, there was much
shrieking and shaking, and the young immigrant from Hong Kong was
knocked over and began to cry.
Diagram
Time
(Action)
Voices
10:46:50
10:47:01
10:47:05
10:47:12
10:47:15
(K. , a second-grade
Chinese immigrant
is trying to learn
double dutch) "Big Mac
fillet fish"
(she misses)
(Second-grade African
American girl, who
has ends, dances, turns
to her audience, and
points out) "Saved! Saved! "
(Three second graders
dance in place)
(Polish American sixth
grader, enters)
(She is told, nonverbally,
to stand in the middle
and lift her feet in place.
She does. The other turn-
er, her instructor, also a
sixth grader, is checking
to see which rope should
be raised first)
[Off camera] "One, two,
three. "
(Girl steps in place, Sixth grader says,
in the middle of the "Do it again. "
rope; fourth grader
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? ? on side nods that the
right side should be
turned first)
10:47:20 (She jumps high,
both feet together, "Big Mac"
and misses)
Instructor says "I
told you not to
come down! "
10:47: 27 [School bell rings] (honk)
(Girls jump up and
down. A nearby boy
jumps in front of the
camera and shakes his
whole body. The Chinese
girl gets knocked over. )
Of interest in this clip is the capturing of cultural transmission from
ethnicity to ethnicity, something undiscussed in the literature of the school
yard, and also of the banging of one culture-school yard culture-into that
of school instructional time (Pellegrini 1987; Hart 1993). The video cam-
era captured not only the teaching of the game, and the competitive reac-
tion of many of the players as they gauged their relative status, but the con-
text of the school yard and how it affected the players themselves. The vis-
ible time stress at the ringing of the bell, which caused one observer to shake
while another player was knocked over, thus emphasizes the utility of using
a popular culture rhyme, such as Big Mac, for the sake of quick negotia-
tion. At the same time, this also indicates the need to examine the reasons
for the bell as a significant part of the game itself.
Both video clips captured variation in game text, language specific
to the game, and examples of direct and indirect instruction. Both indicate
that there is something about the timing of the ringing of the bell that shapes
the game and the interaction around it and that can be said to be unique to
the culture of the school yard.
BEYOND THE GAME: THE SECOND CAMERA
In order to make sense of patterns across these games, we can compare simi-
lar transcripts, as we did above, and then also comb through the footage of
the wide-angle camera. With this survey of the macro footage, an interest-
ing larger pattern emerged.
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? ? Consistently, at the end of the recess period, violent interactions were
visible on the wide-angle screen. In glimpses from the micro footage, one
can clearly see a definite rippling of anger, kicking, punching, and fighting
during the transition back to the classroom. Typically within two minutes
of the ringing of the bell, an almost palpable tension is trackable. In the
macro footage alone, eight out of nine sample tapes showed distinctly vio-
lent conflict in the lining up transition, with six out of the eight violent in-
teractions occurring less than one minute before the bell, and the other two
occurring within two minutes of the bell. In more than half of the micro foot-
age, taken of a variety of games, there are incidences, indirectly captured,
of real fighting or direct violence. And, in all of these images, with only one
exception, the tension occurs within a minute and a half of the ringing of
the bell.
Victor Turner, symbolic anthropologist, has spent much of his career
analyzing the liminal, in-between moments in rites of passage in tribal cul-
tures (Turner 1974a). Although some attention has been paid to transitions
in the sociology of face-to-face communication as studied by Goffman, the
attention of folklorists to transitional times has been minimal. Some atten-
tion has been paid in the folk game literature to opening rituals like count-
ing out rhymes (Goldstein 1971; Opie and Opie 1969; Sluckin 1981; Sutton-
Smith 1981a), but these are usually viewed as pregame ceremonies, rituals
designed for the facilitation of games' beginnings.
The phenomenon under
discussion presently is the lack of ritual in the school yard and its associ-
ated lack of transition at game's end.
The second camera allows us to see how the context shapes the game,
beyond the interaction around the text. The study of the one genre, then,
leads to the understanding of the ecology of the larger context. The advan-
tage of extended ethnographic fieldwork in one place is that it allows us to
see the significance of the place on the game, and the patterning over time.
Superficial folk-game surveys that are panoramic mask larger contextual is-
sues and indeed the crossing of ethnic boundaries, which are perhaps only
visible over time. It was apparent that the children needed the entire school
year to reach a point of intimacy with each other, as well as the researcher's
needing that much time to observe the big picture in that place.
BEYOND THE CAMERA
The camera is seductive, as it seems to provide a form of documentation with
less debate and more data. Yet, even when the editing is kept to a minimum
and the shots are taken at the widest angle possible, no camera is objective.
It too is the manifestation of decisions made by the photographer, ranging
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? ? from angle to height to light to the very decision as to when the tape begins
and ends. The goal is not to present a new objectivity in folk game presen-
tation, but rather to present the performances on the film or video back to
as many participants as possible in order to collect yet more stories about
the folk games as cultural markers.
When the adults at the Mill School viewed the above clips, several
of the staff responded that the tapes were "too happy" and performance
oriented, and many shared that they had never observed anything but "mis-
behavior" during recess. Many of the staff did become nostalgic about the
games they had played during their childhoods; they noticed that although
some were the same, many were different with new and different rules. The
comment about misbehavior is significant, given that the staff generally had
the opportunity to come to the school yard only in the last few minutes of
recess, which I have documented as the time of most conflict. They indeed
missed all the constructive cultural expressiveness and sharing that occurs
in the earlier parts of the play period.
When the third- through fifth-grade girls, both African American and
European American, viewed the clips, their reaction was delight, pride, and
outright laughter. For several it was an opportunity to reflect upon their own
process of learning how to "do double dutch. " For Tanya, a fifth grader, it
was a chance to comment on the misdirection of the above double dutch
lesson. She had been taught to enter the ropes and begin by jumping in near
the ends. In the above clip, the immigrant child from Hong Kong and, later,
the Polish American girl, were being instructed in the middle of the rope,
with the rope being turned from a stationary position around the jumper.
This was considered to be much more difficult, indicating that there is an
acknowledged art to instruction as well as performance.
Tanya, like many of her expert double dutch friends, started learn-
ing "how to jump" when she was six or seven years old. Her training, like
theirs, was intensely visual and often meant observation without direct par-
ticipation. "I started in like, first, or second grade, got to be first or second,
because my, I never knew how to jump, but my cousin was in, my cousin
was in the eighth grade and my cous used to always play rope, and I used
to always jump in they (sic) rope, and they used to get mad at me, and kick
me back to my line. " For Rica, an African American fourth grader, the pro-
cess also involved the observation of older girls, and had to do with her
"catching on" to the new songs. "This is how I learn because when people,
like older people start jumping, yeah, like I catched on to the song, like
Tamisha's sister, she'd be singing all these bunch of songs I don't know. And
the next (day) they'd have two of them. "
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? ? If we are going to be able to understand the process of the transmis-
sion of culture within the boundaries of one place, such as the school yard,
as well as across the boundaries of that place, and across time, such reflec-
tions can be most insightful. The study of children as tradition bearers within
an ethnic tradition and in a multiethnic setting sheds light on children's folk-
lore as an area of cultural study, and not just cultural collection. Their pro-
cess is more than aural, it is kinesthetic and intensely visual, and our pro-
cess as fieldworkers can parallel it.
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? ? 5 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
Linda A. Hughes
Most studies of children's folk culture are based on collecting and analyz-
ing items of folklore like rhymes, jokes, riddles, and games. Few describe
or analyze the ways children use their folklore, or how its form and func-
tion vary across social contexts (J. Evans 1986; Factor 1988). In this chap-
ter, I explore some important conceptual and methodological issues involved
in shifting the focus from collecting children's folk games to describing how
children play them, and contrast the very different images of children that
can emerge from these two types of studies. I will focus first on developing
a model of game rules that allows players to mold their games to the de-
mands of social life in particular settings, and, second, on adopting the play
episode, not the game, as the basic unit of analysis.
GAMES AND GAMING
Kenneth Goldstein (1971) long ago demonstrated that there can be significant
differences between the characterizations of children's folk games and the ac-
tual games. In his observations of children playing counting-out games such
as the "game of chance," Goldstein recorded a range of familiar practices that
were not consistent with common characterizations of the game (Roberts and
Sutton-Smith 1962). In fact, much of what Goldstein observed, such as choos-
ing rhymes with different numbers of beats depending on the number of players
and tagging on additional rhymes if the initial outcome was not the one they
wanted, appeared to be designed to minimize the role of chance in determin-
ing outcomes. Their activity, he argued, was as much a "game of strategy" as
of chance. And to Goldstein that made a difference in how we analyze this
game, and especially in how we characterize the experiences and skills of its
players. It led him to caution that "the rules which are verbalized by infor-
mants and which are then presented by collectors in their papers and books
for our analysis and study are. . , the rules by which people should play rather
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? ? than the ones by which they do play" (Goldstein 1971, 90). Few studies of
children's folk culture since have heeded this caution.
Denzin (1977) and Fine (1983) have proposed the term gaming to
describe the processes by which players mold and modulate the raw mate-
rials of their games into actual play. This is not simply a matter of creating
variants of the rules of a particular game, as many folklorists have assumed.
The same rules can also be understood and used in qualitatively different
ways by different groups of players. As Maynard (1985, 22) has observed,
"[T]he way a rule is used in a group may be more important than the con-
tent of the rule in describing a local group's culture . . . [C]ultural objects
[including rules] need to be approached not by way of previously established
content but by way of how they emerge and function in the communication
patterns of a particular group. " Game rules can be interpreted and reinter-
preted toward preferred meanings and purposes, selectively invoked or ig-
nored, challenged or defended, changed or enforced to suit the collective
goals of different groups of players. In short, players can take the same game
and collectively make of it strikingly different experiences. '
The conceptual and methodological framework I will be developing
approaches children's folk games not as sets of game rules, but as highly situ-
ated social contexts in which real players collectively construct a complex and
richly textured communal experience. I will begin by describing three differ-
ent rule systems that are implicated whenever games are actually played: game
rules, social rules, and higher-order gaming rules governing the interplay be-
tween game structure and social process. I will then contrast several qualities
of games with qualities of the social episodes in which they are embedded in
the playing. Throughout, I will draw on my own observations of how one
group of girls played the common ball-bouncing game foursquare to illustrate
implications of the framework being developed for actual studies of child cul-
ture. A brief description of this study can be found in the appendix.
GAME RULES, SOCIAL RULES, AND GAMING RULES
The study of children's gaming begins with the assumption that most games
in the playing, and certainly the vast majority of folk games in childhood,
are, as Goldstein (1971) suggests, something more than a listing of their rules.
They are richly textured, and highly situated instances of social life. Play-
ing games is something of a very different order than describing them (Collett
1977), and it always requires that players know something more than the
rules of the game.
To play competently and well, for example, players usually need at
least some degree of physical or strategic skill (Avedon 1971). They also need
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? ? social knowledge and skill, however, and it is this aspect that will be of pri-
mary concern here. Players incorporate general cultural knowledge about
such things as fairness, cheating, and being a good sport or a team player
into their playing. They also display a more situated social/interactional com-
petence (Speier 1976) or knowledge about such things as initiating and sus-
taining complex interactional sequences, and generating and regulating ap-
propriate, responsible group conduct.
A primary goal of gaming studies is to describe how the social worlds
of players are integrated with the stated demands of particular games to gen-
erate qualitatively different versions of the same activity. They are concerned,
therefore, with at least three primary domains of meaning: the rules of the
game (the game text), the rules of the social world in which that game is
embedded in the playing (the social context), and the additional domain of
shared understandings that is generated out of the interaction between game
structure and social process in particular times and places (gaming rules).
Gaming rules are not of the same logical type (Bateson 1972) as ei-
ther game rules or social rules. They are higher order "rules for rules"
(Shimanoff 1980) that derive from the need to manage and negotiate the
interplay between the game and other contexts of everyday life (Collett
1977). They consist, among other things, of shared understandings about
(1) when and how the rules of the game ought to be applied, ignored, or
modified; (2) which of many possible interpretations is most appropriately
applied to specific instances of the same or very similar actions; (3) which
of many possible courses of action is to be preferred over others in particu-
lar circumstances; and (4) what are the limits and consequences of accept-
able conduct in the game. 2
Gaming rules, like other rules of the social world, have a critical evalu-
ative dimension, and this is reflected in phrases like "ought to be," "pre-
ferred" and "acceptable. " We often judge some ways of accomplishing the
same ends to be qualitatively different (nice or mean, fair or unfair, respect-
ful or disrespectful), and to view some of them as more or less acceptable
or appropriate in particular contexts (Fine 1987; Roberts 1987). This qual-
ity is a major methodological concern in studies of children's gaming.
All of this implies, as Goldstein (1971) proposed, that what players
do when they play games is not fully described by reference to the rules of
the game. This runs counter to the commonsense view that rules, and per-
haps especially game rules, tell us what we can and cannot do, and thus needs
to be explored in greater detail. In the following section, I will outline an
alternative way of thinking about rules, including game rules, that permits
the kinds of interpretation and negotiation that characterizes episodes of
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? ? social life like playing a game.
RULES AND RULES FOR RULES
We commonly think of rules, and perhaps especially game rules, as being
rather rigid and explicit, as primarily prescriptive and proscriptive in func-
tion (Shimanoff 1980). This contrasts with the perspective commonly
adopted by those who describe social life in terms of rules, and who think
of rules as highly ambiguous, largely implicit, and essentially productive or
generative in function (Harre and Secord 1972; Hymes 1980; Shwayder
1965). The former conception, which has appropriately characterized most
studies of games, emphasizes the many ways rules confine the range of ac-
tions available to players. The latter conception, however, stresses how rules
help us choose among the many possible courses of action available to us
in the course of everyday life (Brenner 1982; Gruneau 1980). It rests upon
an analogy with the grammatical rules of language, which do not explicitly
and rigidly determine each and every utterance we make, but instead guide
our construction of novel yet meaningful and appropriate action. 3
Game rules do strongly shape what happens within a particular game.
To borrow from Goffman (1959) and Burke (1945), game rules typically set
a scene by identifying an appropriate setting, a set of necessary props, and
game roles. They then outline a sequence of game action, which is usually
cyclical and repetitive (L. Hughes 1983, 1989). At another level, game rules
also create distinctive domains of meaning (placing a ball in a hoop, for ex-
ample, has particular meaning within the context of a game of basketball),
and specify a typically nonpragmatic relationship between means and ends
(one does not approach the task by using a ladder).
Game rules still leave substantial areas of ambiguity, however, and a
central task in gaming studies is to describe players' perceptions of areas of
ambiguity and how they go about managing them. Game rules do not rig-
idly and explicitly specify each and every move in the game or, as Goffman
(1974, 24) observes, "establish where we are to travel or why we should
want to, . . . [they are] merely the restraints we are to observe in getting
there. " One does not, as Shwayder (1965, 243) notes, "succeed in getting
into a certain chess position by following the rules of chess. " There are many
ways of accomplishing the same ends within the general "restraints" of the
rules (Brenner 1982; Collett 1977; Gruneau 1980).
There is also another very important sense in which game rules pro-
vide an ambiguous framework for player action. In the social world, we
do not respond simply and objectively to what people do, but rather on
the basis of what we take actions and events to mean (Harre and Secord
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? ? 1972). Translated into the world of gaming, this means that while game
rules may tell us what we can and cannot do, they do not also tell us what
is to count as an instance of that "doing" (Brenner 1982; Harre 1977).
The same or very similar actions can be taken to mean very different things
to different players and in different contexts of occurrence. This is perhaps
the most central tenet of the study of children's gaming. It can be illustrated,
however, in the most formal of gaming contexts, professional sports. "(Na-
tional Hockey League) referees must have an instinct for which violations
to call and which to ignore. They themselves talk of 'good' penalties (fla-
grant violations such as tripping the player with the puck) and 'bad' ones
(minor offenses such as hooking a player who doesn't have the puck late
in a tight game). 'You could call a penalty a minute,' says referee Ron
Fournier. 'But that's not what we're supposed to do. You call a guy for a
minor infraction and even though you cite the rule number, he just looks
at you and says, "What's that? " It doesn't earn you respect'" (Shah 1981,
emphasis added).
Competent hockey players and referees are clearly expected to know
what a "hook" is, and what are the rules about "hooking. " But they are
just as clearly expected to know that all "hooks" are not to be understood
or responded to in the same way. These types of understandings are often
implicit (thus the appeal to an "instinct," not to the rule book for hockey),
they are subject to choice and evaluation ("You could. . , but that's not what
we're supposed to do"), and they lead to social, rather than game-prescribed,
consequences (the referee just cited is concerned about winning or losing
"respect," not about winning or losing the game). All of these qualities are
clear markers of gaming rules.
Children make similar distinctions. The players I observed responded
very differently to the same move in different contexts of performance, and
they recognized important differences between what you could do under the
game rules and what you were supposed to do as a socially competent mem-
ber of a play group. Their actions in the game had clear social consequences
outside its bounds, and this strongly shaped the meaning of actions under
the rules of the game. Their treatment of the common act of "slamming the
ball" will illustrate.
In the game of foursquare, as in many other ball-bouncing games, a
"slam"4 is a hard bounce high over the receiving player's head. "Slams" are
difficult to return, and thus constitute one way players can try to eliminate
another player from the game. They were usually understood to be prohib-
ited by "the rules" among the players I observed.
Despite this prohibition, however, "slams" were very regularly used
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