The Theater of Games

In my article, The Theater of Games, I begin to describe children's games as if they were a kind of literature, real literature, sometimes exceptionally profound literature, a literature like, if you'll forgive the implications, plays.

Recently, I've come to realize how central this insight is to most of what I've been teaching and doing for the last 40 years: how valuable and fun for parents and teachers and youth leaders to think of children's games as performances as significant and meaningful as theater pieces.

So, with this post, I hope to share my sometimes amusing musings, and invite you to do the same.

I first wrote about games (social games, board games, even card games) as a performed art in a series of Games Preserve Reports that I started writing in 1971. But it wasn't until four years ago that I actually realized I was talking about games as theater. Here's a part of it where I write about a game I've probably talked about several hundred times - "Duck Duck Goose."

I had to play it first. And when I did, I realized that the clearly silly game of Duck-Duck-Goose fully satisfied my criteria for a meaningful, kid-produced, kid-acted, kid-directed, theatrical experience. It was highly dramatic. It was something they actually wanted to do, actually could organize and become engaged with. Thus I began work on my “theater” curriculum and my lifelong exploration of the Theater of Games.

I soon discovered I was working within a global theater. Searching for more and more games, I found books of games from all over the world. The Games that are played out in the Theater of Games are in fact a form of literature – not written, maybe, not even oral, perhaps, but “enacted” – and thus handed down, from generation to generation, brother to brother, culture to culture. The literature of games can convey complex relationships, roles and consequences, issues of conflict and heroism.

See also Of Geese, Wolves, Games and Culture.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith