Games of Old

Kids nowadays are armed with IPads and smartphones where they play solitary games which left no room for the imagination.  There is hardly any interaction unless you considered LAN games or Facebook.  I wouldn't call that social interaction if I were me and I am, so I'll go on to say that social networking is not social interaction.

Its a sorry state of affairs but this is the price we pay for advancement.  Back in the old days, the games we played were far more creative.

We drew and cut out our own paper Barbie dolls. Designed and coloured our own Barbie clothes and compared them with our friends, learning a thing or two about designs and fashion as we progressed. Today, its just a matter of buying the latest from the shelves.

We drew lines in the sand and played something called Hopscotch, sweating and cursing and enjoying every minute of it. If we get bored with Hopscotch, we flipped five stones on our palms.  The stones were hard on our palms so some of us started sewing little bags and filling them up with rice.  Its been so long I no longer remember the rules of the game.

Then there's that thing we did with rubber bands. We stood behind a line and cast out a rubber band as far as we could. If its your turn and your rubber band overlaps another, then that rubber band is yours.

"My Mother went to market to buy some ribbons. What colour do you want?" We tapped on a finger each time a word is recited from this quote and where it ends, the owner of the finger gets to choose a colour. If she chooses "Brown", you spell out the letters  (which is 5 lettered) as we tapped the following fingers and where it ends (5 fingers down the road), that finger gets eliminated from the pool.  When all your fingers are eliminated from this pool, you win the game.

In retrospect, I might add that we were a happier creative lot. Our generation of Baby Boomers went on to create a better world.