Tag Archives: children’s game

Freeze Tag

Informant: The informant is my sibling. A Mexican American boy who is 14 years old and currently an 8th grader at a charter school in Los Angeles California.

Context: The following excerpt is a conversation that happened when both of us were discussing some of our favorite school recess games. One of them froze tag and the following transcript describes how he remembered playing freeze tag in elementary school. In the excerpt I refer my sibling as J.

Transcript:

J: “When my class or group of friends played, I remember specifically that it was always a girl vs boys tag. It was really fun because it was always a competition to prove who was the best. The tagger is chosen at random, and they have to try to run around as quickly as possible to catch or freeze the runners. When someone was tagged what happened next, is that they are frozen there on the spot and they have to be unfreezed by their teammates. If you see your teammate being freezed, then you have to make the decision of either risking yourself.”

Analysis: Having played this version when I myself in the past brought a lot of nostalgia. My sibling and I have an age difference of 6 years old. Therefore, seeing how much this game has kept the same demonstrates just how much this game has become almost like given tradition. Freeze tag is something that every child should or at least all of them experience. Because there is a lot of running: the child who is the “it” is able to develop critical thinking skills to “touch” the runner. In addition, there is a lot of social skills that are developed as there has to be communication between the runners in order to save themselves from the “it.” When it come to the competition of both sexes, I think it just demonstrates how both are being able to explore their identities.

Mary Mack

Context:

AS grew up in Ontario, Canada, and remembers playing this clapping game on the playground growing up. This piece was performed as a form of play between two children in coordination with a clapping game. The game consisted of both participants clapping their two hands together, then clapping on of their hands to the other person’s (right hand to right hand) and then repeating, alternating the hand that they clapped against the other participant’s.

Main Piece:

“Oh Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
All dressed in black, black black,
She asked her mother, mother, mother
For fifty cents, cents, cents, 
She climbed a fence, fence, fence,
She went so high, high, high,
She didn’t come back, back, back,
Till the Fourth of July, -ly, -ly”

Additional Commentary:

“I don’t know why we said fourth of July because that meant nothing to us as kids. But, the point was, is it kept going and going and going and going, and it got slowly faster and faster and faster until one of you messed up. Then you probably slapped ‘em or something, I don’t know. So there were lots of variations on that.”

Analysis:

Both the rhythm of the clapping game itself and the song are relatively simple, so once the game and song are learned, the challenge consists in the ability to maintain coordination of singing and clapping in the correct rhythm while continuously increasing the speed. The song rhymes and repeats in sections, which makes it easier to remember.

AS has no idea what the song was about, but still remembers the lyrics and hand movements decades later. Though, with the general trend of folkloric children’s songs being about taboo topics like sex and death, there are some lines that could point in that direction. The lines “She climbed a fence… she went so high… she didn’t come back… till the Fourth of July” seem like they could hint at something darker, especially since they do not clarify how she came down (climbing or falling). The final line also points the origin of the song in the United States, as the Fourth of July is Independence Day in the US. AS grew up in Canada, so, as she mentioned, the date “meant nothing to us as kids.”

When trying to discern the meaning of the song, it’s important to mention that there are other recorded versions of this song that include different variations on the lyrics. In another version, it is not Mary Mack that climbs the fence and doesn’t come down till the Fourth of July, but instead an elephant that jumps the fence, touches the sky, and doesn’t come back till the Fourth of July. For a recording of that version, refer here: “Miss Mary Mack,” Ian Cabeen, USC Digital Folklore Archives, May 17, 2021. http://folklore.usc.edu/miss-mary-mack-2/

Charlie, Charlie

Background: Charlie Charlie is a children’s game similar to a ouija board in which a group of kids get together and ask a spirit, Charlie, to answer their yes or no questions. My informant S is a 19 year old girl who played the game when she was in middle school. We were talking about our childhoods and trying to find some similarities between the games we played.

S: So the game is simple, you have a piece of paper with “yes” and “no” written on opposite corners of the paper, so like, yes across from yes and no across from no y’know, and you cross two pencils in the middle so neither are pointing at the corners, one on top of the other so it kind of balances on top of the bottom one. And then everybody asks “Charlie, Charlie, are you there?” and then the pencil on the top moves and points and everyone loses their minds. Charlie is supposed to be a demon or something.

Me: I think I’ve seen something like that. It was kind of an internet thing wasn’t it?

S: Yeah it was during Vine in like, 2013. I found out about it because I saw videos on youtube and then everyone in school was trying it. It was like everywhere for a while.

Me: It’s crazy how I don’t even remember it. I wonder if kids still play it. So, do you think it was real?

S: No of course not, someone would always like, blow on it so it would move. But if one gullible kid lost their shit, it was a good time.

My thoughts: The prevalence of this game is interesting because it was so widely spread online, and it reached kids from all over the country and possibly the world who played it for themselves. It was such a short lived cycle because it took place in the early 2010’s when short videos, such as Vines, were growing in popularity, and people began to consume more pieces of smaller media. Things would become rapidly popular and then become rapidly replaced, a trend cycle which has continued into the 2020’s with apps like TikTok.

Cheese Touch

Context: The Cheese Touch game was popularized shortly after the publishing of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series and corresponding movies. The Bone Touch was one group’s variation of this popular game, instead altered to fit a rural ranch setting, replacing the forbidden cheese with a cow hide being displayed as decor.

A.F. : Okay. The Cheese Touch is, so, um, typically if someone touched cheese in elementary school they would have the Cheese Touch and the only way to get rid of it is to pass it on to someone else.
P.Z. : Yeah, I know that we played that at my elementary school, but we had also, because we were in rural San Diego, we went to a ranch and there was a cow hide, and it still had a bone attached to it, so that started the Bone Touch, but yeah, the Cheese Touch.
A.F. : Yeah
P.Z. : That was really popular, what, late two-thousands? Early two-thousands?
A.F. : Late two-thousands, early twenty-tens.

Thoughts: I had read the books that this game was based on, so the game made perfect sense to me when it began gaining popularity. This seemed to be extremely popular for a number of years, and seemed just a variation on the ‘cooties’ game that children often also play.

Thumper

Context: This is usually played as a theatre student or children’s game and is chanted while alternating between clapping your hands and slapping your thighs.

A.F. : It’s called Thumper, which—
P.Z. : Thumper?
A.F. : Which, it is played two ways, like the main two
P.Z. : Okay
A.F. : So it’s like “Thumper, thumper, this is how you play, one, two, three, four,” and then you can say like, say we can play the name way. So like “[name], [name], [collector’s name], [collector’s name], and then when it’s passed to you you have to say “[collector’s name], [collector’s name],” then someone else’s name and if you mess up then you’re out.
P.Z. : So if you mess up, as in..?
A.F. : Like, you’re off beat, or you forgot to say a name, so say if I say “[name], [name],” then I forget to say the next name then I’d be out
P.Z. : Okay, so you want to be the last person?
A.F. : Yeah. And then the other ways you can play are like, you’re an animal, or have a sign, like you can be like, a llama, a narwhal, a unicorn, like, you have to do your sign and then the other person’s animal. So that’s the two ways we typically would play.
P.Z. : And there’s two versions of that one?
A.F. : Yeah, one about names and—
P.Z. : And was that another camp game, or..?
A.F. : Thumper’s just a childhood game.
P.Z. : Childhood? Like elementary school?
A.F. : Yeah, I’d say elementary/middle school

Thoughts: I’ve heard of numerous theatre-style games from my friends who are acting majors or simply took an acting class. Some other examples include the game Zip Zap Zop. It seems the purpose of these games, traditionally played with children from elementary school to high school age, is to have players focus on memorizing multiple requirements and keeping track of a number of rules and names simultaneously.