Tag Archives: kids

Kids’ game- fingers

Nationality: American
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Lawrenceville, NJ
Performance Date: 4/22/12
Primary Language: English

My informant remembers this game from being a kid, primarily in elementary school. The game begins with both players holding out their hands, each hand with only one finger extended, the rest curled into the hand. The players take turns choosing one of the opposing person’s hand to tap with one of their hands. When a hand is tapped, that player must extend an additional numbers of fingers on the hand equal to the number of the hand it was tapped with. So if a player has two fingers extended on his hand and taps the opponent’s hand, which has one finger extended, the opponent must extend two more fingers, leaving his hand with three extended. When a hand reaches exactly five fingers, it’s put away. If it goes over five (ex. it has three fingers and is tapped by a hand with three), the difference between the number it should have and five is how many it ends up with (from the example, it would now have one finger). The objective of the game is get both of your opponent’s hands to be put away. Also, when one of your hands has been put put away, if you have an even number of fingers on the other hand, you can “split.” That means you use your turn to tap your fists together and redistribute the number of fingers on one of your hands between the two evenly.

The reason my informant likes this game and remembers it fondly is because its making fun out of nothing; it doesn’t require any materials besides your hands. And it’s strategic and logical; by thinking it through, you can decide the best move and win by being smarter or more skilled than your opponent. My informant likes games of strategy like that and remembers that after being taught the fingers game at a very young game by peers, he realized his interest in strategy as well as his competitive urge. He eventually moved on to chess, which is still a big part of his life.

The game, to me, is interesting because it represents kids experimenting with things like logic and strategy at an early age. It makes problem solving fun; you have to think a lot to know how to win but then you’re rewarded with respect from your peers if you do.

Hand to face prank

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/13/12
Primary Language: English
Language: French

Something she learned as a kid, my informant remembers this piece of folklore from middle school. The way it works is someone says that if your hand is bigger than your face, you have cancer. Then, when you put your hand up to your face to check, they push your hand into your face. It’s painful and annoying and it makes my informant remember why she hated things like that when she was younger, tricks kids would make up to hurt others. Because the kid the prank is pulled on fails to realize they’re being tricked, it becomes almost acceptable to hurt them. The pain comes as a result of the person’s failure to realize it’s a trick. This is why many people accept it when they get hurt from a prank like this, versus if someone randomly just hit you in the face, in which case you might less readily let it go. My informant remembered being a kid and not differentiating between the two cases, though. When a peer did this to her, her response was to kick him in the leg. The prank is something she hasn’t forgotten because it serves as a reminder of that human desire to hurt others and be in positions of power over them, where it becomes acceptable to hurt them. My informant dislikes that quality of humanity but finds it interesting that it exists and that things children do often reflect it.

The prank also acts as a kind of initiation into the group of people who know it. Once it’s been done to you, like a college hazing ritual for example, you want to do it to the person who doesn’t know about to get revenge upon whoever did it to you. And once the prank’s been done to you once, it can’t be repeated unless you forget how it works. This makes it not seem as bad, since even if it hurts you, it also teaches you what it is so you feel like you gained some knowledge from the experience. Humans learn from pain, and this is an example of that. The prank’s existence also shows how children like to push limits to see what’s socially acceptable. Mature adults would be less likely to perform this prank because it is against social codes to malevolently trick someone like that.