My daughter is ten and in these writings I will call her Hanauta (ha na oo ta - meaning humming in Japanese.) I think she is pleased with this arrangement, I have, it seems, transmitted to her my own attraction to pseudonyms through which we can be a secret both hidden and revealed. We were walking uphill, Friday evening, glad for the end of the week, and talking, for reasons I can’t quite reconstruct, about games that boys play in yards and parks. Hanauta surprised me, saying that 5th grade boys play cops and robbers. “Really! They still do?” I wasn’t sure whether I meant: ‘they still do at age 10?’ or ‘they still do in 2010?’ “You know what is funny?” she said, “they have cops, they have robbers, but they never have victims.” Dazzled as I was by this observation, it could hardly be otherwise. Games are neither theater nor reality, but another thing, always somewhat alien to me though I know it to be central to childhood (and humanity, by extension?) From time to time I take up the project of researching ideas about play and games. Then there are things to do (taxes, heartache, new jobs, and other consuming disruptions.) I leave off and forget, completely, everything I read and thought about the study of play. Yet my interest, both deep and dissociated, remains.
Among my students, both boys and girls, Monster is a favorite game combining running and being wanted. There are elements of hiding and narrowly escaping from a corner but the principal action of the game is the flight of the many from the one (monster.) The narrative, such as it is, can be conveyed with “I’m gonna get you” or a roar, or even just two upraised, menacing paws. Some children are dedicated to only one of the two possible roles (scary/scared) but most will switch hit. At the outset the game can be competitive, a snarl of potential monsters, baring teeth and heaving with the effort of their roars, each one with head a-tilt as though angling to clamp teeth on vulnerable tracheae. Eventually the real monster is established and the game can begin in earnest. While girls and boys are united in their love of monster, they can have different patterns of play. Boys often stay immersed for longer stretches, making many monotonous, gleeful circuits of the space. It seems that girls soon find other thoughts emerging; they do not hold for quite as long to the boundaries containing that binary world of pursuer and pursued, but branch out with talk of cats, sisters, princesses, babies. So they separate out the parts, boys and girls, cleaving the running from the being wanted. But because no one is ever really caught, really ever “gotten” there can be no victims. With monsters in the yard it is a good world.
