Hello you beautiful people, it has been another week of the year end grind and I come to you with my thoughts on games from the 50’s vs. present day. For some context, as we reached the end of our unit on Canada in the 1950’s, Ms.Maxwell decided that we would take a look at popular children’s games from the 1950’s and analyze the similarities and differences between them and the popular games of today. The games we ended up looking at were Mother may I, kick the can, hop scotch, and button, button, who’s got the button.
Now, I find that when people look at things from the past and compare them to present days they tend to focus on what has changed and rarely on their similarities. This was exactly what happened in class when we talked about the games compared to now, we were looking to see how they were different and forgot to look deeply into why they are also similar. That is why I’m going to be looking at the similarities of these childhood games to today and why that may be.
First of all, I think the main thing to remember while looking at these games is that although we may not play these neighbourhood games much anymore, the type of simplicity and openness of the games kids will play are the same. Think of games that you play on the playground like grounders, four square, or tether ball. All of them have easy to teach rules but still allow for a good amount of competition, just like many of the games in the 50’s.
One other thing that I think is very similar between the two ages of games that’s pretty interesting is that everyone would learn it just a little differently, whether that be what different things were called, to general rules, like how long the it person counts. All of these games have little variations not them just depending on who taught you which I think is crazy to think about.