Street games everywhere

Street Games are informal sports, adapted to environment, the materials, and the spirit of the people playing. They are played without adult supervision, without official people or equipment. They are games that you can take very seriously, sports with loose enough rules so that you can play with just about anything, anywhere, with just about anybody you want to play with.

Playing in the street is probably as old as streets themselves. Streets are a natural playspace, depending on the traffic. Just take a look at Breughel's painting of maybe 200 middle-age children (though they may look middle-age, they are in fact children at play in the middle ages) playing more than 80 different children’s games.

In the late 19th century, most of the games Street Games Culin reported on were played on streets that led into vacant lots or were surrounded by fields or crossed rivers and train tracks. By the middle of the 20th century, streets were bounded by houses and each other. Around this very time, most of the games that were still being played in the streets – especially in the streets of big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and London - became the very games most commonly cited as “authentic” Street Games: Wall Ball, Stick Ball, Box Ball, Hand Ball, Stoop Ball, Skully. Jacks, Marbles, hopscotch, and Double Dutch, too.

For the World War generations, Stick ball and Skully would be grow to be considered the archetypal Street Games. Stick ball would become an official sport, as much like baseball as possible, originally played with a stick for a bat, an old tennis ball for a baseball, a sewer lid for home plate, a car and a sign post for first and third. And frequently no second base at all. And now played on Stick Ball Fields with official Stick Ball Sticks and even Stick Ball Balls.

Skully is like marbles, only instead of marbles it’s played with bottle caps filled with candle wax, and instead rolling, you slide the caps, like little shuffleboad pucks, and instead of playing in a circle, you play on a big rectangular, chalk-drawn field of lines and boxes.

Skully and Stick Ball, like all Street Games, originated as informal sports, adapted to environment, the materials, and the spirit of the people playing. (There are games you can play with half a ball, for example, with just three people, if you have to.) They are played without adult supervision, without officials. They are games that you can take very seriously, just like real sports but their rules are just loose enough to let you can play with just about anybody you want to play with. Street Games can, and have, become formalized, and commercialized. You can buy official sticks for Stick Ball. Official Spaldeens and Half Balls, too.

Street Games are continuously changing and adapting to their environment, to the players and the evolving technologies of play. There are still kids who are playing in the Street Games spirit, but the streets they play in, and what they play, and whom they play with, are, for the most part, a far cry from the way we played Stick Ball. They still play their own Street Game versions of baseball and football, soccer and hockey, but they play for the most part in their private yards or on the sidewalk, and they have nerf balls and whistling nerf footballs and portable street soccer goals and hockey pucks that hover. And yet, as far as everyone’s concerned, they’re playing something very much like what we called Street Games. They are playing in a way so that everyone can play. They are all players. They are all officials.

Though played on Razors and skateboards and BMX bikes, modern Street Games, like all Street Games, are replete with intricate tests of agility, opportunities for invention, and performances of death-defying originality. Each, like the classic Street Game, remains somehow informal, adapted to the environment, materials, and spirit of the people playing.

Street Games have their virtual equivalents in video games, especially in games that involve physical movement, like the Wii, or, slightly earlier, Dance Dance Revolution, each with its many different game playing modes, where players get to choose to cooperate and compete, follow and lead.

In every expression, it’s the dynamics of Street Games – how they are organized and maintained, how they are supported by their community, how they engage players in learning, teaching, designing, and leading open-ended play contracts, where you can change the rules, where winning isn't the point, really, where it's all about getting to play - that are most instructive.

When you begin to explore how a Street Game is governed, how it empowers its players, and becomes redefined by the way they want to play together – you discover an almost perfect reflection of the social architecture of successful communities – neighborhood and national, physical and virtual.

Street Games are remarkably easy to overlook. Many parents who moan over their children's inability to play manage to ignore the Street Games being played all around them.

Part of the reason that parents overlook the Street Games they’re own kids are playing is that they can’t see them. That’s because Street Games are being played on a very different kind of street from those of their parents. Street Games take place everywhere, but most often in spaces noted anthropologist Victor Turner called these spaces "liminal" - spaces that comprise an unofficial, temporary, anybodyland; spaces that exist between buildings and sidewalks, steps and parking lots, between front yards, across fences, behind the library and garage. “In between” spaces. Like the Internet.

Street Games are governed, officiated over by the people who play them. Just like the, oddly enough, Internet.

And, like the Street Games of the past, Street Games of today are played mostly by children in their liminal years – not-yet-adults, too old to be seen as kids – and are played everywhere.

Even on the railing of the library steps. Even on the cell phone and in chat rooms. Even on the Internet.


See also:

Iona and Peter Opie's Children's Games in Street and Playground, Norman Douglas' London Street Games , and especially the Streetplay website.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith