Children of primary school age spend a considerable part of their free time in role-playing games. These fall into three categories:
- Make-believe games, such as "School" or "Martians" or "Families", where characters, plot and dialogue are improvised;
- Games modelled on TV or video stories, such as "Neighbours" or "Farthingwood Friends", where characters and plot are set by the current episode but where the dialogue is improvised;
- Acting games, which have unlikely and sometimes horrific story lines, set dialogue which is passed from one generation of children to the next, and characters which are allotted at the beginning of the game. These form a small but interesting group of games and are the aspect of children's play which is relevant to this conference.
In my research into children's games played by eight-year-olds in the Keighley area, I found two acting games among Punjabi-speaking children. One, called 'Aami, aami' ('Grandma, grandma'), resembles 'Grandmother, Grandmother Grey', a game which was popular in nineteenth-century Britain, but is no longer played by English-speaking children in Keighley. The other, 'Bhatsha, M'Rani', is about a king and a wicked queen who take people into their house and make them work at various menial tasks.
An interesting English example, 'Bobbins of cotton', was recorded in 1976 but has disappeared from the schools I visited. A video recording was made then and is available. The plot concerns children, who are bobbins of cotton. Each bobbin is stolen from the shop by an unscrupulous thief who comes in a variety of guises and outwits the shopkeeper.
Although considered by the children to be games, and although to an adult eye they may appear to be nothing but running about and screaming, playlets such as 'Bobbins of cotton' are undoubtedly old. The Opies, in Children's Games in Street and Playground (1969), record a similar acting game from a German source in 1836 and are of the opinion that, given the conservative traditions of children's play, most of these acting games, "may be some of the most genuine folk-plays in Britain".