Competent hockey players and
referees
are clearly expected to know
what a "hook" is, and what are the rules about "hooking.
what a "hook" is, and what are the rules about "hooking.
Childens - Folklore
net/2027/usu.
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hathitrust.
org/access_use#cc-by-nc-nd-3.
0
? ? 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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? ? without any indication that players perceived a game rule to have been vio-
lated. This was possible because whether the same or very similar "move"
was taken to constitute a "slam" was not a simple matter of assessing what
a player had or had not done. At one level, these players felt obliged to con-
sider such things as the heights of the particular players involved, their
relative skill levels, and their degree of engagement in or distraction from
play. A low, easy bounce might constitute a "slam" to a short, inexperienced,
or temporarily distracted player, but not to an older, more skilled, or
attentive one.
At another level, players' interpretations of "slams" were also influ-
enced by relationships among the players involved, and even by who would
come into the game next if a "slam" was successful. A very hard bounce
among "friends" was understood quite differently than the same "move"
among members of different social cliques. A "slam" was far more likely to
be interpreted as a "real slam," and not "just an accident," when its effect
was to bring a friend rather than a nonfriend into the game.
Maynard (1985) has observed that one has to know the history of
relationships among children in order to understand what is going on in their
disputes. The same is also true of understanding what is going on in their
games. There are rules among children for who can appropriately do what
to whom (Davis 1982; Eder and Sanford 1986; Thorne and Luria 1986),
and actions under the game rules are often interpreted within this additional
domain of social obligation and responsibility.
The example of "slams" illustrates this point particularly clearly. The
players I observed were generally much more concerned about the intents
and purposes underlying a particular performance of a "slam" than they
were about the outward form of the action itself. Both were essential to per-
ceptions of whether a "rule" had been broken or not, and to generating an
appropriate response (Hughes 1988, 1989, 1993). As noted above, friend-
ships provided a primary context for assessing motives and their appropri-
ateness, and this in turn strongly shaped players' judgments of the accept-
ability of actions under the rules of the game. Even their terminology for
differentiating among different types of "slams" reflected the importance of
motive over form. There were "minislams" and "nice slams," and there were
"rough slams" and "mean slams. " Each called for a different type of re-
sponse.
Incorporation of social criteria like motives into judgments about the
status of particular actions under the rules of the game can have far-reach-
ing consequences. Motives are notoriously difficult to prove and impressions
of one's intentions can be actively managed and manipulated. Among the
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? ? players I observed, this created substantial areas of ambiguity that were then
subject to both playful and serious manipulation for strategic purposes. s They
could, for example, violate the stated rules against such moves as "slams"
and still be treated as though they were acting in a totally appropriate and
acceptable way. This was because strict adherence to the game rules did not
allow them to fulfill critical social obligations to their friends. In fact, the
gaming rules, which did incorporate rules concerning the responsibilities
inherent in friendships, often required "slams" to nonfriends even when they
were very explicitly prohibited by the game rules. I will return to this ex-
ample below, as it provides a particularly clear illustration of the highly sig-
nificant subtleties of meaning that can be generated out of the need to rec-
oncile the (sometimes competing) demands of social structure and game
structure.
"BASIC RULES" AND THE RULES OF PLAY IN PARTICULAR SETTINGS
Having stressed the importance of attending to how groups of players in-
terpret the rules of their games, I should note that play groups also elabo-
rate the rules of their games in ways that are important to understanding
the principles underlying play in particular settings. The players I observed
clearly distinguished between the "basic rules" of foursquare, those that
correspond to the rules presented in printed descriptions of this game, and
a variety of other types of rules they used in playing the game (Hughes 1989).
The "basic rules" (Table 1) were only a small part of what players listed as
the rules of their game (Table 2), and they were not even included among
what they called the "real rules" of the game. In fact, these "basic rules"
did not seem all that important to players. They almost never mentioned
them when asked about the rules of their game, and when queried about
them, they dismissed them as "just things you had to do. " Players were far
more interested in the rules they generated and controlled, and that they
could use to introduce excitement, variety, strategy, and fun into the game.
These are precisely the kinds of rules and practices that rarely make their
way into descriptions of games, despite their apparent importance to the
players themselves.
TABLE 1. The "Basic Rules" of Foursquare
Hit a ball that lands in your square to another square.
Let the ball bounce once, but only once, in your square.
Don't hit a ball that lands in another square.
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? ? TABLE 2. The "Real Rules" of Foursquare
AC/DC
Babies
Baby Bottles
Baby Stuff
Backsies
Backspins
Bishops
Bops
Chances
Comebacks
Country and
City
Donna Rules
Double Taps
Duckfeet
Fair Ball
Fair Square
Fakes
Fancy
Fancy Day
Fast Ball
Fish
Friends
Front Spins
Frontsies
Getting Out on
Serve
Goody Rules
Half Slams
Half Wings
Holding
Interference
Kayo Stuff
Knee Balls
Lines
Low Ball
Main Rules
Mean Slams
Mean Stuff
Medium Ball
My Rules
Nice Ball
Nice Slams
Nice Square
No Outs
One-Handed
One-Two-Three-
Four
Part-Rules
Poison
Practice
Purpose Duckfeet
Purpose Stuff
Randi Rules
Ready
Regular Ball
Regular Rules
Regular Spins
Regular Square
Regular Volley
Rough Ball
Rough Slams
Rough Square
Saves
Saving Places
Secrets
Slams
Mini-Slams
? ? Mandy Slams
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? ? games and qualities of the episodes in which they are embedded in the play-
ing. I will begin by contrasting the stated point of the game with the pur-
poses of its players (Sabini and Silver 1982), and then consider, in turn, the
significance of nongame prescribed action to the creation and maintenance
of gaming episodes, the relative roles of competition and cooperation in the
study of games and gaming, and the interplay between the interpretive
"frame" defined by the game (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974) and players'
own "framings" of what occurs within its bounds.
THE POINTS OF GAMES AND THE PURPOSES OF PLAYERS
Games usually have some clearly stated objective or point, almost always
stated in terms of criteria for determining winners and losers. Participants
in the game, however, have purposes, and these may be shaped not only by
the game but also by the social matrix in which it is embedded. Players may
incorporate a variety of goals or purposes beyond those specified by the ac-
tivity (Brenner 1982; Collett 1977; Maynard 1985), they may define "suc-
cess" very differently than the game defines "winning" (Simon 1985), and
they may further reinterpret "winning" in light of a variety of agendas that
are totally extrinsic to the game itself. Whenever we judge some ways of
winning to be more or less appropriate than others, we recognize that suc-
cess may be something more than meeting the criteria of the game. A six-
foot tall adult who defeats a child at basketball, for example, would nor-
mally be viewed as winning in a very different sense than when he competes
with someone of similar size and skill. 6
The issue can be much more complex, however. Players' own crite-
ria for success may differ from, and even conflict with, the game's criteria
for winning. The girls I observed provided a particularly striking example.
They played within a social matrix that demanded that they help and pro-
tect their friends, or at least make an appropriate display of doing so. This
demand for a collective orientation interacted with a game that defined win-
ning as an individual achievement in a variety of interesting and significant
ways (Hughes 1993). For example, players who played the game according
to its rules, competing as individuals, were treated as though they were act-
ing in a totally inappropriate and unacceptable way. They were quickly elimi-
nated from the game. This was because the gaming rules among these play-
ers required that they sustain the impression that they were "mean" only to
help and support their friends, not for their own personal gain. Players them-
selves were quite clear about this discrepancy between how the game was
supposed to be played and how it actually was played.
IOI
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? ? Amanda:7 It's supposed to be that you treat everyone equal and
no one's your friend and no one's your enemy. . .
Everyone is just all for yourself. That's the way it's
supposed to be. It's like one on one. It's not supposed
to be team on team.
Janet: It's not supposed to be (laughs).
Author: You make it sound like lots of times it is team on
team, though.
Chorus: It is! (laughter) (Fieldnotes 4/27/81. Emphasis in
original)
Regardless of what the game rules said, these players still played foursquare
like a team game, with groups of friends vying for control of the game. In
fact, much of what happened in the playing of this game would be totally
inexplicable in the context of individual competition, even though this game
has long been categorized that way.
Activities and Episodes
Just as players need not always be primarily oriented toward game-prescribed
procedures and outcomes, what happens during gaming episodes need not
always be primarily defined by the game. An episode defined as "playing
the game" may incorporate a great deal of action that is in no way defined
by the activity itself, even though it may be strongly shaped by its occur-
rence within one type of social episode rather than another. There are many
possible breaks in, or overlays upon, the action specified by the game. There
may be time-outs, fights, discussions, interruptions, interference, stalemates,
"side-plays" and "side-involvements," changes in "keying" or "footing"
(Goffman 1963, 1974, 1981). Some are woven into and concurrent with
action that is primarily defined by the game. Others are perceived as clear
breaks or interruptions in the game (Denzin 1977).
All of this can be ignored when the purpose is to describe games and
their rules. When the purpose is to describe how players understand and
collectively negotiate a particular instance of gaming, however, close atten-
tion must be paid to all of the activity that is woven into and around the
game. Players need to understand and manage transitions among activities
that are defined primarily by the game and those that are not, and they need
to integrate the flow of action across those boundaries in meaningful ways.
Many important gaming rules deal with these issues, and a great deal of
communicative activity among players concerns their management.
Incidents of this type tend to cluster around transitional junctures in
102 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
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? ? the game, (Erickson and Shultz 1981), as players partition it into emic units
(Clarke 1982) of game-related and non-game-related action, and then inte-
grate these units into a single episode of play. Systematic mapping of what
can and must occur at these various slots and nodes (R. Lindsay 1977; von
Cranach 1982) provides critical information concerning basic principles
underlying play in particular settings. Figure 1, for example, illustrates the
basic episodic units defined by the game of foursquare. In contrast, Figure
2 more closely approximates the episodic structure as I saw it played in the
setting I observed.
Mapping the structure of the gaming episode is critical because it cre-
ates highly repetitive units for analysis and because players often display their
understandings of actions and events more explicitly during breaks in the
game itself (Collett 1977; Grimshaw 1980; R. Lindsay 1977; Marsh 1982).
When things go smoothly, the principles organizing an exchange may not
be apparent at all. When something goes wrong from players' perspectives,
however, or when interpretations of actions seem to require a great deal of
management, those principles may become the explicit topic of discussion.
When players are accused of inappropriate conduct and must defend or ex-
cuse their actions, or when players stop play to fight over the finer points
of what did or did not happen in a particular exchange, they provide a win-
dow on their own interpretations of actions and events, and on the processes
by which they collectively negotiate and renegotiate those interpretations as
new circumstances arise.
The players I observed very clearly illustrated the methodological
importance of identifying and attending to such "contexts of justification"
(Harre and Secord 1972; Much and Shweder 1987), many of which occurred
outside of what players perceived to be "playing the game. " Challenges to
actions under different types of rules, for example, only occurred at certain
junctures. Players only selectively challenged actions under some types of
rules and not others. And they employed only a few types of responses to
such challenges: "I couldn't help it," "I didn't mean to," and "I didn't know. "
Analysis of the types of accusations that were made or not made and under
what circumstances, and especially of the conditions under which they suc-
ceeded or failed, provided a very important entree into the basic principles
underlying play in this setting. They were an important clue, for example,
to the underlying concern for motive noted above, and they illustrated very
clearly how the difficulties inherent in assessing motive could be managed
and manipulated to a variety of ends.
The form of accusations, denials, and excuses, and especially their
contexts of use, for example, helped explain why players were called out for
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? ? FIGURE 1. Structural model of the game of foursquare
PROPS
SETTING
(court)
PLAYERS
(five)
(yes)
tt
(no)
wait
(no) -4
wait
explain/ -
demonstrate
t
(no)
(yes)
(no) -
(yes)
4
DON'T PLAY FOURSQUARE
(no) - PLAY A VARIANT OF
FOURSQUARE
"practice"
"three square"
"two square"
king has ball?
(yes)
players are "ready"?
(yes)
"KING" CALLS THE RULES
,
- players understand/accept rules?
- players are "ready"?
4, 4
wait (yes)
wait " "KING" SERVES THE BALL
44
apologize (yes)
(no)= -- - no one is out on the serve?
(yes)
PLAY THE GAME
PLAYERS
ROTATE
OUT
(yes) ambiguity? -- (yes)
(yes)
responsible -- (no)
for actions?
leaves court? 4-----(yes)
(no)
give "chances"? -
(no)
(no) - STALIEMATIE
4
(yes)
(yes)
"KING" CALLS
A TAKEOVER
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? ? FIGURE 2. Structural model of an episode of playing foursquare
PROPS
(ball)
SETTING
(court)
PLAYERS
(five)
(yes)
"KING" CALLS THE RULES
YERS "KING" SERVES THE BALL
PLA'
ROTATE
PLAY THE
OUT-
4'
GAME
4
violating only some types of rules and not others, despite players' stubborn
insistence that they would be out for violating any of them. It seems useful
to develop this example in somewhat greater detail here, because the prin-
ciples involved are so fundamental to gaming in this setting and thus criti-
cal to further discussion.
The players I observed recognized a number of different types of game
rules. Motive was essential to assessing the status of actions under only some
of them, and their ways of responding to perceived violations varied accord-
ingly. The game rule "no holding" will illustrate the basic workings of this
system and how it affected play at many levels in this setting, though all of
what these players called the "real rules" of their game operated in much
the same way (see L. Hughes 1989 for a full description of rule taxonomy
and use among these players).
? ? 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. "
90 DOUBLE DUTCH AND DOUBLE CAMERAS
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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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? ? without any indication that players perceived a game rule to have been vio-
lated. This was possible because whether the same or very similar "move"
was taken to constitute a "slam" was not a simple matter of assessing what
a player had or had not done. At one level, these players felt obliged to con-
sider such things as the heights of the particular players involved, their
relative skill levels, and their degree of engagement in or distraction from
play. A low, easy bounce might constitute a "slam" to a short, inexperienced,
or temporarily distracted player, but not to an older, more skilled, or
attentive one.
At another level, players' interpretations of "slams" were also influ-
enced by relationships among the players involved, and even by who would
come into the game next if a "slam" was successful. A very hard bounce
among "friends" was understood quite differently than the same "move"
among members of different social cliques. A "slam" was far more likely to
be interpreted as a "real slam," and not "just an accident," when its effect
was to bring a friend rather than a nonfriend into the game.
Maynard (1985) has observed that one has to know the history of
relationships among children in order to understand what is going on in their
disputes. The same is also true of understanding what is going on in their
games. There are rules among children for who can appropriately do what
to whom (Davis 1982; Eder and Sanford 1986; Thorne and Luria 1986),
and actions under the game rules are often interpreted within this additional
domain of social obligation and responsibility.
The example of "slams" illustrates this point particularly clearly. The
players I observed were generally much more concerned about the intents
and purposes underlying a particular performance of a "slam" than they
were about the outward form of the action itself. Both were essential to per-
ceptions of whether a "rule" had been broken or not, and to generating an
appropriate response (Hughes 1988, 1989, 1993). As noted above, friend-
ships provided a primary context for assessing motives and their appropri-
ateness, and this in turn strongly shaped players' judgments of the accept-
ability of actions under the rules of the game. Even their terminology for
differentiating among different types of "slams" reflected the importance of
motive over form. There were "minislams" and "nice slams," and there were
"rough slams" and "mean slams. " Each called for a different type of re-
sponse.
Incorporation of social criteria like motives into judgments about the
status of particular actions under the rules of the game can have far-reach-
ing consequences. Motives are notoriously difficult to prove and impressions
of one's intentions can be actively managed and manipulated. Among the
98 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
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? ? players I observed, this created substantial areas of ambiguity that were then
subject to both playful and serious manipulation for strategic purposes. s They
could, for example, violate the stated rules against such moves as "slams"
and still be treated as though they were acting in a totally appropriate and
acceptable way. This was because strict adherence to the game rules did not
allow them to fulfill critical social obligations to their friends. In fact, the
gaming rules, which did incorporate rules concerning the responsibilities
inherent in friendships, often required "slams" to nonfriends even when they
were very explicitly prohibited by the game rules. I will return to this ex-
ample below, as it provides a particularly clear illustration of the highly sig-
nificant subtleties of meaning that can be generated out of the need to rec-
oncile the (sometimes competing) demands of social structure and game
structure.
"BASIC RULES" AND THE RULES OF PLAY IN PARTICULAR SETTINGS
Having stressed the importance of attending to how groups of players in-
terpret the rules of their games, I should note that play groups also elabo-
rate the rules of their games in ways that are important to understanding
the principles underlying play in particular settings. The players I observed
clearly distinguished between the "basic rules" of foursquare, those that
correspond to the rules presented in printed descriptions of this game, and
a variety of other types of rules they used in playing the game (Hughes 1989).
The "basic rules" (Table 1) were only a small part of what players listed as
the rules of their game (Table 2), and they were not even included among
what they called the "real rules" of the game. In fact, these "basic rules"
did not seem all that important to players. They almost never mentioned
them when asked about the rules of their game, and when queried about
them, they dismissed them as "just things you had to do. " Players were far
more interested in the rules they generated and controlled, and that they
could use to introduce excitement, variety, strategy, and fun into the game.
These are precisely the kinds of rules and practices that rarely make their
way into descriptions of games, despite their apparent importance to the
players themselves.
TABLE 1. The "Basic Rules" of Foursquare
Hit a ball that lands in your square to another square.
Let the ball bounce once, but only once, in your square.
Don't hit a ball that lands in another square.
99
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? ? TABLE 2. The "Real Rules" of Foursquare
AC/DC
Babies
Baby Bottles
Baby Stuff
Backsies
Backspins
Bishops
Bops
Chances
Comebacks
Country and
City
Donna Rules
Double Taps
Duckfeet
Fair Ball
Fair Square
Fakes
Fancy
Fancy Day
Fast Ball
Fish
Friends
Front Spins
Frontsies
Getting Out on
Serve
Goody Rules
Half Slams
Half Wings
Holding
Interference
Kayo Stuff
Knee Balls
Lines
Low Ball
Main Rules
Mean Slams
Mean Stuff
Medium Ball
My Rules
Nice Ball
Nice Slams
Nice Square
No Outs
One-Handed
One-Two-Three-
Four
Part-Rules
Poison
Practice
Purpose Duckfeet
Purpose Stuff
Randi Rules
Ready
Regular Ball
Regular Rules
Regular Spins
Regular Square
Regular Volley
Rough Ball
Rough Slams
Rough Square
Saves
Saving Places
Secrets
Slams
Mini-Slams
? ? Mandy Slams
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? ? games and qualities of the episodes in which they are embedded in the play-
ing. I will begin by contrasting the stated point of the game with the pur-
poses of its players (Sabini and Silver 1982), and then consider, in turn, the
significance of nongame prescribed action to the creation and maintenance
of gaming episodes, the relative roles of competition and cooperation in the
study of games and gaming, and the interplay between the interpretive
"frame" defined by the game (Bateson 1972; Goffman 1974) and players'
own "framings" of what occurs within its bounds.
THE POINTS OF GAMES AND THE PURPOSES OF PLAYERS
Games usually have some clearly stated objective or point, almost always
stated in terms of criteria for determining winners and losers. Participants
in the game, however, have purposes, and these may be shaped not only by
the game but also by the social matrix in which it is embedded. Players may
incorporate a variety of goals or purposes beyond those specified by the ac-
tivity (Brenner 1982; Collett 1977; Maynard 1985), they may define "suc-
cess" very differently than the game defines "winning" (Simon 1985), and
they may further reinterpret "winning" in light of a variety of agendas that
are totally extrinsic to the game itself. Whenever we judge some ways of
winning to be more or less appropriate than others, we recognize that suc-
cess may be something more than meeting the criteria of the game. A six-
foot tall adult who defeats a child at basketball, for example, would nor-
mally be viewed as winning in a very different sense than when he competes
with someone of similar size and skill. 6
The issue can be much more complex, however. Players' own crite-
ria for success may differ from, and even conflict with, the game's criteria
for winning. The girls I observed provided a particularly striking example.
They played within a social matrix that demanded that they help and pro-
tect their friends, or at least make an appropriate display of doing so. This
demand for a collective orientation interacted with a game that defined win-
ning as an individual achievement in a variety of interesting and significant
ways (Hughes 1993). For example, players who played the game according
to its rules, competing as individuals, were treated as though they were act-
ing in a totally inappropriate and unacceptable way. They were quickly elimi-
nated from the game. This was because the gaming rules among these play-
ers required that they sustain the impression that they were "mean" only to
help and support their friends, not for their own personal gain. Players them-
selves were quite clear about this discrepancy between how the game was
supposed to be played and how it actually was played.
IOI
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? ? Amanda:7 It's supposed to be that you treat everyone equal and
no one's your friend and no one's your enemy. . .
Everyone is just all for yourself. That's the way it's
supposed to be. It's like one on one. It's not supposed
to be team on team.
Janet: It's not supposed to be (laughs).
Author: You make it sound like lots of times it is team on
team, though.
Chorus: It is! (laughter) (Fieldnotes 4/27/81. Emphasis in
original)
Regardless of what the game rules said, these players still played foursquare
like a team game, with groups of friends vying for control of the game. In
fact, much of what happened in the playing of this game would be totally
inexplicable in the context of individual competition, even though this game
has long been categorized that way.
Activities and Episodes
Just as players need not always be primarily oriented toward game-prescribed
procedures and outcomes, what happens during gaming episodes need not
always be primarily defined by the game. An episode defined as "playing
the game" may incorporate a great deal of action that is in no way defined
by the activity itself, even though it may be strongly shaped by its occur-
rence within one type of social episode rather than another. There are many
possible breaks in, or overlays upon, the action specified by the game. There
may be time-outs, fights, discussions, interruptions, interference, stalemates,
"side-plays" and "side-involvements," changes in "keying" or "footing"
(Goffman 1963, 1974, 1981). Some are woven into and concurrent with
action that is primarily defined by the game. Others are perceived as clear
breaks or interruptions in the game (Denzin 1977).
All of this can be ignored when the purpose is to describe games and
their rules. When the purpose is to describe how players understand and
collectively negotiate a particular instance of gaming, however, close atten-
tion must be paid to all of the activity that is woven into and around the
game. Players need to understand and manage transitions among activities
that are defined primarily by the game and those that are not, and they need
to integrate the flow of action across those boundaries in meaningful ways.
Many important gaming rules deal with these issues, and a great deal of
communicative activity among players concerns their management.
Incidents of this type tend to cluster around transitional junctures in
102 CHILDREN'S GAMES AND GAMING
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? ? the game, (Erickson and Shultz 1981), as players partition it into emic units
(Clarke 1982) of game-related and non-game-related action, and then inte-
grate these units into a single episode of play. Systematic mapping of what
can and must occur at these various slots and nodes (R. Lindsay 1977; von
Cranach 1982) provides critical information concerning basic principles
underlying play in particular settings. Figure 1, for example, illustrates the
basic episodic units defined by the game of foursquare. In contrast, Figure
2 more closely approximates the episodic structure as I saw it played in the
setting I observed.
Mapping the structure of the gaming episode is critical because it cre-
ates highly repetitive units for analysis and because players often display their
understandings of actions and events more explicitly during breaks in the
game itself (Collett 1977; Grimshaw 1980; R. Lindsay 1977; Marsh 1982).
When things go smoothly, the principles organizing an exchange may not
be apparent at all. When something goes wrong from players' perspectives,
however, or when interpretations of actions seem to require a great deal of
management, those principles may become the explicit topic of discussion.
When players are accused of inappropriate conduct and must defend or ex-
cuse their actions, or when players stop play to fight over the finer points
of what did or did not happen in a particular exchange, they provide a win-
dow on their own interpretations of actions and events, and on the processes
by which they collectively negotiate and renegotiate those interpretations as
new circumstances arise.
The players I observed very clearly illustrated the methodological
importance of identifying and attending to such "contexts of justification"
(Harre and Secord 1972; Much and Shweder 1987), many of which occurred
outside of what players perceived to be "playing the game. " Challenges to
actions under different types of rules, for example, only occurred at certain
junctures. Players only selectively challenged actions under some types of
rules and not others. And they employed only a few types of responses to
such challenges: "I couldn't help it," "I didn't mean to," and "I didn't know. "
Analysis of the types of accusations that were made or not made and under
what circumstances, and especially of the conditions under which they suc-
ceeded or failed, provided a very important entree into the basic principles
underlying play in this setting. They were an important clue, for example,
to the underlying concern for motive noted above, and they illustrated very
clearly how the difficulties inherent in assessing motive could be managed
and manipulated to a variety of ends.
The form of accusations, denials, and excuses, and especially their
contexts of use, for example, helped explain why players were called out for
103
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? ? FIGURE 1. Structural model of the game of foursquare
PROPS
SETTING
(court)
PLAYERS
(five)
(yes)
tt
(no)
wait
(no) -4
wait
explain/ -
demonstrate
t
(no)
(yes)
(no) -
(yes)
4
DON'T PLAY FOURSQUARE
(no) - PLAY A VARIANT OF
FOURSQUARE
"practice"
"three square"
"two square"
king has ball?
(yes)
players are "ready"?
(yes)
"KING" CALLS THE RULES
,
- players understand/accept rules?
- players are "ready"?
4, 4
wait (yes)
wait " "KING" SERVES THE BALL
44
apologize (yes)
(no)= -- - no one is out on the serve?
(yes)
PLAY THE GAME
PLAYERS
ROTATE
OUT
(yes) ambiguity? -- (yes)
(yes)
responsible -- (no)
for actions?
leaves court? 4-----(yes)
(no)
give "chances"? -
(no)
(no) - STALIEMATIE
4
(yes)
(yes)
"KING" CALLS
A TAKEOVER
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? ? FIGURE 2. Structural model of an episode of playing foursquare
PROPS
(ball)
SETTING
(court)
PLAYERS
(five)
(yes)
"KING" CALLS THE RULES
YERS "KING" SERVES THE BALL
PLA'
ROTATE
PLAY THE
OUT-
4'
GAME
4
violating only some types of rules and not others, despite players' stubborn
insistence that they would be out for violating any of them. It seems useful
to develop this example in somewhat greater detail here, because the prin-
ciples involved are so fundamental to gaming in this setting and thus criti-
cal to further discussion.
The players I observed recognized a number of different types of game
rules. Motive was essential to assessing the status of actions under only some
of them, and their ways of responding to perceived violations varied accord-
ingly. The game rule "no holding" will illustrate the basic workings of this
system and how it affected play at many levels in this setting, though all of
what these players called the "real rules" of their game operated in much
the same way (see L. Hughes 1989 for a full description of rule taxonomy
and use among these players).
