See Also: Educating Freethinking Kids – Lessons From Camp Quest

Summary:

• Play is an essential characteristic of human and cultural development.
• Play is a common human experience, and can bring people together.
• Games like “rock paper scissors” and “Ampe” can be used to solve disputes amicably.

In 2009, I traveled to Accra, Ghana to study the culture of children’s games and play. The goal was to conduct a comparative study in Ghana as well as Tanzania and the United States and I anticipated that differences in play among Ghanaian, Tanzanian, and American children would be common and easily recognizable. After all, developmental psychologists, philosophers, and educators often point to play as a “ground zero” of culture. For example, the Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga argues that the taxonomic classification of humans as Homo sapiens is a misnomer. Instead of Homo sapiens (man the thinker), Huizinga recommends Homo ludens (man the player) and points to the unique functions of play in human life toward shaping the evolution and culture of the species. As a Humanist, I find special value in play because of this power. Where people of faith point to the Church as the source of community, morality, and meaning, I point to play. The classic argument against humanism says that without a church community, individuals will be disconnected and easily led astray; only the Church can provide the moral and societal grounding that people need. But I believe that it is play which provides this source of meaning, with all its language, fun, rules, and ritual.

As a researcher, I wanted to prove this by identifying and illustrating the common and divergent aspects of play in my locales; my idea was that by identifying commonalities in play across cultures, I would be illustrating commonalities in humanity. Then, all that remained would be specific examples of ways in which play shaped individuals as cultural agents; at which point I’d “really be on to something”. But, after six months abroad and a publication in a local journal, I still felt like I hadn’t gained a real grasp of what it meant to play within a given culture, I left my locales with far more questions than answers and what I felt was only a glimpse of Homo ludens. It was only after I started sharing my experience with others (particularly children) that I began to understand the universality of play and its common language.

Last summer at the camp where I work, I introduced a Ghanaian game called Ampe to the children as a way to solve disputes between them. Ampe is similar to the American game rock-paper-scissors in that it involves two players “facing off” with a winner determined by the player’s decision of what to do with their bodies. In “rock paper scissors”, the shape a player’s hand takes is the deciding factor, in Ampe, the focus is on how a player lands on her feet after three successive jumps. The campers loved this new game and were quick to adopt it; before I knew it, I started hearing things like “you can’t have the last s’more, I’m still hungry too!” “Okay, lets Ampe for it” “Okay, one, two,…” I thought this was fascinating; I wondered if the girls I learned the game from would know what a s’more was, or if they would laugh at the awkward jumping of their American counterparts. But, as I watched my campers playing together in the same way that children five thousand miles away were playing the same game, what I didn’t wonder, was if these kids had anything in common.