Folk Game Research Articles

The Game Ordo as an Element of Forming the Strategic Thinking of the Kyrgyz Ethnic Group

The article examines the uniqueness of the Kyrgyz folk game ordo from more than 50 different games on alchiki (in the Kyrgyz language chuko). The essence of ordo is revealed as a team game of men knocking out the khan and the alchiks from the drawn circle. The circle drawn on the ground meant the territory of the state, in the center of which was the ruler’s headquarters (a depression was made where tompoy-alchik was located. Rival players worked out a plan to capture a given country using various maneuvers. The author shows that this game was a kind of military map of the state, with the help of which the Kyrgyz (men) were trained in the military art of maneuvering, the ability and methods of introducing combat operations. It formed the players’ strategic and tactical thinking skills, which contributed to making well-thought-out decisions in the interests of the community. There are five types of ordo games. It is noted that the researchers pay attention to the fact that ordo is found among nomadic peoples only among the Kyrgyz. This game, forgotten in the Soviet era, is now included in World Nomadic Games. The author draws attention to the importance of teaching the ordo game as a sport from the school bench in all educational institutions of the republic.

The value of preserving endangered folk games using the contingent valuation method

ABSTRACT This study aims to estimate the value of preserving Uiseong Gama Ssaum (traditional Korean palanquin fighting) as an endangered folk game, using the contingent valuation method (CVM). To reduce the tendency to exaggerate the value estimation, one of the CVM's acknowledged limitations, the respondents’ answers were reaffirmed through two stages of confirmation questions. The study established that the value of preserving Uiseong Gama Ssaum as an endangered folk game was set at 7,259 Korean won (KRW) ( = 6.06 USD). The results also suggest that the respondents’ sense of cultural uniqueness was positively associated with a willingness to pay (WTP). The study is meaningful in estimating the economic value of endangered folk games and justifying their preservation based on the provision of a quantified standard.

Проблемы внедрения фольклорной игровой практики как коррекционно-профилактического ресурса (результаты и перспективы экспериментальной работы)

The folk game practice is proposed as a variant of execution of the idea of substituting sociogenesis. Game situations create conditions for intensive interaction, communication and allow solving the problem of correction and prevention of deviant behavior through the social and communicative development of children. In the context of the formative experiment when testing the game program, the influence of game practice on improving the sociometric status of children, on their ability to recognize, accept and comply with various rules, regulatory interaction and communication is demonstrated. The implementation issue of the game practice is the lack of game specialists. The presence of games presented in text descriptions and recommendations for organizing the game is not enough for the successful organization of real game situations. The experience of implementation and distribution of the game practice has shown that children easily and joyfully accept the game experience, but there is not enough space and time for its sustainability, as well as specialists of real game experience that would offer it to children. Game training of specialists is required. These are the main difficulties in implementing game practice as a tool of preventing and correcting deviant behavior.

Local Folk Games and Health Promotion: Case Study, Saba Tossing Game of Thai Raman People in Ongkarak District, Nakornnayok Province

The objective of this research is to study the results of health promotion by playing the local folk game: Case study of playing Saba of the Thai Raman folks in Ongkarak district of Nakornnayok province and to find the guidelines in developing folk game: Case study of playing Saba of the Thai Raman folks in Ongkarak district of Nakornnayok province, promoting good health for the communities in Ongkarak district. The sample group consisted of fitness specialists, people involved in health promotion and the local Thai Raman players of the local Saba folk game in Ongkarak district. Collected data by observation and in-depth interviews. Analyzed results with content analysis techniques. It is found from the study that: 1) The playing of Saba folk game of the Thai Raman folks in Ongkarak district is popularly played during the Songkran festival. Participants in the competition consist of local folks in Ongkarak sub-district, such as locals from the sub-districts of Chomphol and from Phra-Ajarn communities, and people from other districts of Pathumthani, Nonthaburi and Bangkok, etc. 2) The Saba tossing game has the result of an exercise, not less than playing Petanque, if played continuously, having good effect on the functioning of the muscles. 3) Guideline in developing the folk game: Case study of playing Saba game, promoting good health for the local communities in Ongkarak district, should be of joint efforts from 3 units: Public Health unit providing information, linking exercise by playing Saba game in promoting good health. Administrative unit should provide the sports ground suitable for Saba game and arranges Saba tossing competition for drug prevention and the Educational unit should arrange as sports activities in the schools. The 3 units should then jointly collect the data concerning health conditions of those playing the Saba game, to study the data, developing the reduction of risk of illness continuously.

Українські народні ігри як свідчення давності язичницьких обрядових дійств

Щодо проблеми ставиться питання про недосліджену сторону трансформації рухливих ігор із ритуально-обрядових дійств в народні ігри. Як саме у народній грі збереглися приховані обрядові дійства з прадавніх часів на українських землях? Як саме людина минулого за допомогою ігрових рухових дій намагалася вплинути на сили природи. Як у прадавні часи людина, будучи об’єктом впливу навколишнього середовища, розпочала будувати себе й свою ігрову історію? Чому в народних іграх, що збереглися до наших днів, приховуються магічні рухи обрядових дійств давніх українців, у яких простежуємо міфи, легенди, перекази, стосунки, працю, військові події. Мета роботи – з’ясування передумов походження народної гри та спроба зрозуміти бачення світу давніх слов’ян за допомогою рухових дій. У викладі основного матеріалу розглядаємо трансформацію ритуально-обрядового ігрового дійства в народні ігри як явища цілісного й універсального продукту, як центру конструювання відносин колективу з природою. Викладено світобачення давніх слов’ян, а саме: як за допомогою руху в грі людина минулого бажала вплинути на сили природи; яким чином рух поєднував міфи, легенди, перекази в ритуально-ігрових дійствах; у яких теперішніх іграх приховано міфічні ритуально-обрядові дійства, що з плином часу перебудувалися в народні ігри та забави. Подано гру як засіб регулювання, збереження, відтворення й розвитку загальнолюдських стосунків і цінностей у соціокультурному просторі. У висновку констатуємо взаємозв’язок ритуально-обрядових рухових дій давніх українців із силами природи та трансформацію цих дій (із плином історичного часу) у народні ігри, що є залишками міфічного бачення світу давніх українців.

On the Architecture of the Folk Game: The Case of 'The Floor is Lava'

Foursquare. Hopscotch. Duck, Duck, Goose. While styles of play vary, one striking aspect of children’s folk games is their ubiquity. This characteristic poses an interesting puzzle: how do the folk games of childhood begin? How do they spread across great distances and persist across multiple generations of children? Why are they adopted in certain geographies, among certain socioeconomic groups, and certain age cohorts? How do they disappear? Folklorists of childhood have tended to emphasize the ways in which social networks and meeting points between children act as transmission points. The playground, summer camp, and school serve as prominent scenes of transaction in this work. These accounts rely on a social mode of transmission: a play practice is learned, modified, and transmitted among children in their interactions with one another. This paper offers a conjecture around an alternative mode of diffusion that emanates from the built landscape itself. It explores the notion that vernacular architecture contains a latent space of games which can facilitate the simultaneous, independent discovery of a game across geographies. It leverages what Gary Fine dubs a “ecotypic” approach to folklore, one which looks at the relationship between children’s lore and the environment that it takes place within. In doing so, this analysis aims to propose one causal link bridging broader economic, political, and social forces with the playful spaces they often accidentally create. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, the paper proposes a set of relationships between games and physical spaces. Second, it examines one case study for this conjecture, looking at the game “The Floor is Lava” and its relationship to the development of the suburban home of the United States in the mid- to late-20th century. Third, it will lay out a research agenda based on this initial analysis, suggesting a set of further explorations on the topic.

Research on the Development and Application of Kindergarten Curriculum Based on Traditional Chinese Culture

Chinese traditional culture is the wisdom crystallization of the laboring people of our country in the development of history. It contains excellent education resources such as excellent classic, handicraft and folk game. Integrating traditional culture into the education stage of children, can make children experience and appreciate the excellent culture of Chinese people from an early age, help young children to establish a good moral quality, and form a fine character. Preschool period is a critical period for children’s physical and mental development. Children education stage is an important part of children’s acceptance of education, and it is the beginning stage of preschool education, which has important influence on children’s future study and life development. Therefore, we should fully tap the education resources in Chinese traditional culture, provide the most classic and valuable content for children education, and build a good foundation for children’s future development. By analyzing the classic education resources in traditional Chinese culture and current application status of traditional Chinese culture in education, this paper provides some related measures in order to promote traditional culture in children’s education.

Ресурсы народной игры как социокультурного средства профилактики девиантного поведения

Role-playing can be used as one of the possible means of early professional training in legal psychologists. Defining play-based practice as the content of education eliminates the problem of professional and learning motivation during the first semesters of study. Folk game is considered a cultural form that helps create a developmental, corrective and preventive environment for working with deviant behaviours. The most significant causes of deviant behaviour are commonly thought to be one’s lack of both psychoemotional experience and psychophysiological preconditions for its acquisition. The key factors in an individual’s ability to establish social relations and organise behaviour are his/her experience in communication, ability to take into account other people’s emotional states and to display his/her own states and needs for others to consider. The resources of folk games, apart from them being a cultural form of traditional communication, are the following: the strictness of rules which, at the same time, provide only the framework to the game, thus not interfering with creative activity and improvisation; the richness of images, meanings and emotions in plots; the value of the very process of the game to its participants; the freedom of self-determination for those entering the game; the equality of all participants in regard to roles and rules.

Народная игровая культура как средство формирования норм общения в детском возрасте

The best carriers of playing culture are children, who possess and enjoy it. Destroyed social kids’ structures, territorial kids’ associations (family, yard, village, street communities of children) interrupted generally the process of culture transmission, reproduction and passing of communication tradition. And there is a need in social-state “revivification” (recovering folk games list and its’ players, enough for folk games reproduction process). Folk game includes particular properties of relations on the levels of physical and emotional, vocal interaction, imagery-symbolic filling, special features of clothes (all aspects of communication that constitute features of national culture of the nation and make from the nation the community of people very special and different from other communities and nations). Studying of correctional possibilities of folk games within the frames of playing agendas showed that their psychological and emotional resources provide the conditions for adoption by children the norms of communication.

Shinty, Nationalism and National Autonomy in Scotland, 1887–1928

Studies of the relationships between sport and nationalism have often overlooked how different sports may depict alternative expressions of nationalism. This paper examines how social, cultural and political ideas associated with nationalism and national autonomy in Scotland touched the sport of shinty between 1887 and 1928. During this period, the transformation of shinty from a traditional folk game to a modern sport was consolidated within Scottish Highland society. The paper probes some of the ways that shinty was contoured by, and connected to wider social, cultural and political circumstances of the period. Three strands are considered in the analysis: (i) the place of shinty as a conduit for aspirations of national autonomy, (ii) the different expressions of nationalism in Scotland that oscillated on the landscape of culture and politics and (iii) the connections between shinty and Gaelic sports in Ireland, and the relationship with expressions of nationalism. The analysis is developed using the concepts of national autonomy and civil society. These conceptual components help to probe how shinty symbolised alternative aspirations and expressions of nationalism between 1887 and 1928.

Playing the Tortoise Reading Symbols of an Ancient Folk Game

While the entrance of children into the world of adults has captured attention as a rite of passage with a more formalized conception of ritual, children's lore per se in antiquity is still a largely unexplored topic. While classical scholars often discuss how poems and rituals passed from one generation to another, the tendency has been to neglect the role of children in the transmission of traditional activities and poems, and the interconnections between adult and children's performances. (1) In this paper, I analyze the poetics of one particular game that presents important themes for the study of gender in antiquity: the tortoise game. Specifically, I suggest that by looking at the use of this game in the poetry of Erinna, and by following traces of similar poetic imagery in other parts of the Greek tradition that focus on the female voice, we can form a new approach to the interrelation of different generations and the transition from girlhood to womanhood. (2) As I argue, the tortoise is a marked and evocative reference that bestows greater meaning to performances that highlight this animal figure in their poetics. My aim is to analyze aspects of the processes of oral transmission and to recognize the diachronic context in which variation and re-creation of performances take place. (3) It is only when we see what kind of communication is established among different generations, and how memories of childhood or adolescence are evoked in their literary representations, that we can fully evaluate how a collective voice is formed and becomes a steering force in poetic memory. In both the representation of the tortoise game and Erinna's fragments, there are clear and direct references to female work and death--important aspects of adult daily life. Through games and innocent songs, children are exposed to social norms and expectations; at the same time, the narrative in the songs alludes to cultural practices and beliefs that are perpetuated in time. I. The Chelicheldne Game Let us first consider the ancient testimonia for the tortoise game (chelichelone). Julius Pollux, the second-century CE lexicographer and rhetorician, describes the game, to which Erinna and Eustathius also refer. (4) The game presents an antiphonal structure, a dialogue enacted by a group of girls, one pretending to be the tortoise, in a crystallized version of real game activity which links skillfully the themes of death and traditional female wool-working. The 'tortoise' is a girls' game, similar to the 'pot.' One girl sits and is called the 'tortoise' whereas the others run around her asking her: Tortoise, what are you doing in the middle? I'm weaving wool and Milesian thread. (5) Then they shout back: What was your son doing when he died? From white horses into the sea he was--jumping. (6) At the very utterance of the word 6iXato (jumped), the girl playing the tortoise jumps up and tries to tag another girl, who then becomes the tortoise, ensuring the game's circularity and continuation. Unlike other ancient games' rules, it is not difficult to reconstruct those of this game. They are highly reminiscent of the ephedrismos or ephedriasmos, derived from the verb ephedrizo (to sit upon), referring to a game in which the players try to throw balls or pebbles on a stone placed upright on the ground. If they fail, one player has to carry another while her eyes are covered by the rider's hands until she touches the stone. (7) The iconography of the ephedrismos game clearly reveals it a children's game. The tortoise game, however, according to Pollux, is a game for parthenoi, a word that can refer to girls of marriageable age (Levaniouk 2008, 209). In my reading here, I treat the tortoise game as one of the most common little girls' games in antiquity performed as a 'ring' game; but because of its evocative poetics, it seems to influence, and be a locus of reference for, older girls as well. Its appearance in Erinna's poetry, as we shall see, attests to its importance not merely as a game but as the earliest choral instruction in female repertoire, with the game's action coordinated with a short song. …

MAKNA LEKSIKAL PERMAINAN RAKYAT MELAYU SAMBAS: PENDEKATAN ETNOLINGUISTIK

This study focuses on the observation of cultural object, that is folk games . The referred folk games are traditional games played by the local people. Acquisition of data conducted in the 19 subistrict of Sambas, West Kalimantan. Researcher uses qualitative research method, specifically by translating the vocabulary data of Malay folk games in the District of Sambas. This study also uses ethnolinguistic approach that views the relationship between language and cultural elements within Malay community in Sambas. Analysis conducted by researcher towards the collected data is the type of meaning analysis based on the classification of tools, techniques, player name, and the name of the folk game. By virtue of research, researcher accumulated 173 words as research data. All of data comprise of 30 kind of folk games with classification, that is 51 words as tools, 44 words as techniques, 4 words as player name, and 30 words as the name of the folk games classification.

1609.1 Polish Workers Play Ball at Jamestown, Virginia

Soon after new year [we] initiated a ball game played with a bat.... We rolled rags to make balls.... Our game even attracted savages sat around field, delighted with this Polish sport.1At Jamestown Colony in Virginia in year 1609, a handful of Polish craftsmen took a break from their work to engage in a and ball game called pilka palantowa, or bat ball.2 Among spectators (according to one of Polish players wrote about it later in a memoir), were the savages, who sat around field, delighted with this Polish sport.3 One wonders whether Indians were truly enjoying ball game, or sharing smiles over their secret plans to launch attacks against this settlement of intruders. Whatever case, this first recorded instance of Europeans importing a and ball pastime into New World did not become an immediate trendsetter. The Poles would soon pack up their tools and ballplaying equipment and return to Europe; it would fall to later generations of immigrants to implant seeds of and ball play that would evolve into American baseball.Still, as it turns out, that early-17th century appearance of pilka palantowa in America may have anticipated an influence on American baseball not previously recognized. Palant, as old folk game is more commonly called today in Poland, is linked to an ancient family of northern European and ball pastimes that Danish historian, Per Maigaard, broadly categorized as longball.4 In a 1941 article, Maigaard wrote that longball (he spelled it as one word, but it often appears as ball) was played in many variations throughout Scandinavia, as well as in Germany and Poland. In broad terms he described it as a game with two bases (called a and a home), in which a batter situated at batting home was served a ball from a pitcher, and then struck it as in baseball. After hitting ball, batter ran to running home where he could remain, but could also reverse direction and return to batting home if it was safe to do so. Multiple players were permitted to rest at running home at same time. Outs were recorded by fielders catching batted balls on fly, or by soaking runners between bases.5In my 2005 book, Baseball before We Knew It, I paid little attention to long ball beyond acknowledging Maigaard's theory that game was ancestor to modern ball sports of cricket, rounders, and baseball. I elected not to research sport myself, believing that most potential source material would be written in languages I didn't understand. Besides, my focus at time was on little-known game of English baseball and its likely role as immediate predecessor of American baseball. While recognizing that long ball and other continental pastimes might have had some (as yet undefined) influence on evolution of cricket and baseball in England, I did not at time give any serious consideration to notion that long ball might have crossed ocean and played a role in development of baseball over here.Early baseball is a fluid field of study, however, and recent findings have inclined me to reexamine my thinking on origins of baseball-like play in 18th century America. Because a game called baseball was already established in England by 1750s, I had long assumed that similar activity on this side of ocean was mostly, if not entirely, result of its importation by English children. But this may not have been full story, given that a growing body of evidence now suggests that original English version of baseball was not played with a (the batter struck ball with his or her bare hand).6 If I am right about this, it then raises questions of how American baseball came to employ bat, and whether European influences other than English ones played a role.In following this line of inquiry I thought it would be useful to see how long ball might have fit into picture. …

Thayam: A Frame Game from a Folk Game

Thayam: A Frame Game from a Folk Game

Farce As Method

To get at the nature of farce we go back to beginnings, in either time or structure. Russian folk drama from the seventeenth into the twentieth century, for example, recapitulates much of what we know or infer about rude origins. Here, as Berkov remarks, necessity creates and fixes a manner. Out-of-door performance calls for exaggerated tones, sweeping gestures, loud singing and furious dancing, features which persist when public square and puppet stage, but not groundlings, are left behind. An impudent tone, imposed by the turbulent crowd, provokes performers into the picaresque asides, the jibes and the cheeky stepping out of role which, all the way down from remote beginnings in Attica to Hellzapoppin in New York, have raised their roars of laughter. Brutally enlarged, this is the way of folk game and folk tale, and should remind us, once for all, of the indissoluble bond by which farce is tied to folklore in general; and of what it owes to the point of view and the aesthetics of the folk.