Traditionally the educationalist's interest in children's games seems to be instrumental, if not manipulative. Playing games children can and should learn - the socially desirable, that is. Games seem to offer themselves such exploitation. They subsist in a state of mind and convention rather then in a relation to a specific kind of objects. Any human ability can be played with as a game of skill - competing with others or with personal records. Any human ability can be personified and as a role simulated - and thus trained or at least experienced. And finally, playing games brings functional pleasure; it has its goal in itself. Lately, the educationalist's interest in children's games based rather on respect for autotelism of playing games, then on the ambition to utilize it in motivating children to do their schoolwork, seems to be asserting itself more intensively. The author considers inspirations which this interest could draw from Children's games - a book written by M. Klusak and M. Kucera, presenting and interpreting a collection of more than 1.600 exemplars of schoolchildren's games (collected in 1995 -2000, in 80 classes, from first to ninth grades). Special attention is paid to children playing with social relations - cooperation, competition, bullying.
The classification, the essay deals with, is based on the collection of games played by present-day school-age children in the 1st through 9th class (totally 1600 cases in 81 classes from the 1st to 9th year). The procedures inspired by Mr. and Mrs. Opie from Oxford were used to create the collections (the collection was created with the assistance of students working in the field). First, it was the revised system of so-called basic motifs (1. chasing games, 2. catching games, 3. seeking games, 4. hunting games, 5. racing games, 6. dueling games, 7. exerting games, 7*. schooling games, 8. daring games, 8* shocking games, 9. guessing games, 10. acting games, 11. pretending games, 12. shooting games, 13. gender games); the system was used for classification 'from bellow' - the idea of so-called basic games (1. to touch, 2. in touching the body, 3. object-throwing - with touching the body, 4. throwing the object - on the track, 5. run- with touching the body, 6. run- on the track, 7. motion structure - jogging and rhythmic exercise 8. object structure, 9. guessing, 10. fictive identities and stories). In both types of classification the authors stumbled on the possibility to consider both mutually combining levels in the future - the level of body subjects activity and the level of roles in a game. The first level includes the poetics of drives (oral, anal, scopic etc. in a variety of their transformations), while the other one covers cultural and moral relations ('Oedipus' relations or those deduced from the Oedipus ones) handling with the drives, such as competition, 'bullying', 'democratic' distributions.
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