question…

musingsdeme:

jhoomwrites:

jhoomwrites:

what are some children’s games that could easily be tweaked to help kids survive a zombie apocalypse? for example, hide and seek would teach kids how to hide from zombies until it’s safe.

thank you for the suggestions, guys 🙂 here are the ones i’m using so far…

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Games for Young Children: Help Your Children Learn to Survive Infection

Simon Says

Hide and Seek

The Quiet Game

Tag (and all variations)

Capture the Flag

Baseball

Dodgeball

I know this post is looking forward to the zombie apocalypse and the end of days, but I think it’s also an interesting moment to reflect on these games with a view to the past.  That is where did these games come from?  Why do they seem so universal?  Why do we still play them.  Games in their most basic form teach basic survival (think hand eye coordination, physical strength, endurance, spatial orientation, etc) as well as social skills (following and abiding rules, working as a unit, communication, etc). A lot of cool work has been done in academia about the ways that kids use games to make sense of the world.  So why do these games in particular seem so long lived?  In an oversimplification, it’s because they taught basic survival to tiny humans.  They don’t require toys (not as we would define them anyway), just a group of people, some imagination, and some energy.  

Think hide and seek, which Encyclopedia Britannica dates as “very old” (shorthand for we actually cannot possibly trace this back to a singular time or space).  It’s essentially, at it’s core, an attempt to not be killed by other humans or by animals.  Tag can be dated back to Ancient greece, and, fun facts, “

The game is known by many names, such as leapsa in Romania and kynigito in parts of modern Greece. In some variants the children pretend that the touch carries some form of contagion—e.g., plague (Italy), leprosy (Madagascar), fleas (Spain), or “lurgy fever” (Great Britain). In others, a method of achieving immunity from touch is prescribed, as by touching wood, iron, or a specified colour or assuming a particular position (e.g., squatting)(x)

Though it might be of an earlier origin, Capture the Flag was included in the Boy Scouts handbook, and quite deliberately used to teach young boys the objective of battle (ie conquer enemy territory by reaching their home base). Though this is when the game was given really detailed regulation.  Given the nature of child mimicking adult life (ie warfare) in play, the likelihood of capture the flag being played earlier is really high. 

I taught a class last year about the History of Childhood and Youth and we did two units on games:  one was about late 20th c. board games, but the other was about pre-19th century physical games and toys (I made college children play hide and seek, it was awesome).  The whole purpose of this is that most “children’s games” are designed to teach survival skills, so we don’t need to tweak to much to prepare for the zombie apocalypse since we’ve been trying to keep the tiny humans from dying in terrible ways since ancient times at least. 

PS @jhoomwrites i’m sorry i went on a rant on your post.  Also, you should include a revised Ring Around the Rosie to include tips to avoid zombie infection in you list