WELL! By now you must have completed this! Have you played this before?
Remember those days back in time when all your friends and siblings in the neighbourhood would come together to play this type of game and more for hours and hours without even realising time has elapsed?
The chatter and the laughter that echoed the entire neighbourhood when games were being played.
This article looks into the benefits of traditional games in relation to the games of this digitalised era. It further makes recommendations as to how we can preserve the traditional games for our future generations and at the same time reminisce the true essence of it.
Over the yesteryears, games have played a crucial role in the child’s mental and physical growth contributing to the overall development in terms of their abilities.
With the influx of technological games being introduced in the market, it has threatened the traditional games substantially. Children these days are exposed to violent gadgetised games, thus erasing the traditional games from its grassroots.
As you are reading this piece, I am pretty much sure you can vividly remember some of the traditional games being played by you back then. Would you share the same experience as me hanging around with friends almost anywhere and everywhere playing these? Off course in primary school days, one would just wait for the moment when the teacher would take us outside in the scorching sun to play some of these games.
Games such as gaddu ghoda, three sticks, hopscotch, cat and mouse, tin paani, jhappo, pillo, quinny quinny who has the ball and off course the most ever played game “inky pinky ponky, daddy has a donkey” … kept us all active.
As you may be pondering, where are these games? Do we get to see these games being played by our children today?
Do our children know the names of such games? Are you doing anything to revive these games so that in years to come we can still maintain these games? Certainly not! Our children only know smartphones and other technological gadgets.
In such case, the implicit importance of traditional games over modern games has created stint in the air as what is happening to these traditional games.
For your information, they are dying a slow death. The communities are going blindfold by not persuading and teaching how to play these traditional games. As an educator, I strongly feel that parents and teachers alike should give optimum imperativeness to traditional games.
Furthermore, it has been seen that children, particularly in the primary school, spend too much time playing computer or modern games over traditional. Not realising the repercussions, they tend to sit at one place for good number of hours later ending up being lethargic simply because they rather seem to be exhausted from mind and their eyes sore unbearably.
On the other hand, traditional games tend to do the best in terms of developing a repertoire of skills. These skills boosts the child’s morale and the ability to perform academically well in the teaching and learning ambience. As my personal experience which I flamboyantly remember we used to play almost all the games every day at school as we got the chance. By the time we reached home we still remained energised and full of zealousness and played until the birds went to their abode and the sun was swallowed by the ocean.
On the onset, for children, modern games provided them with the milieu that allows for computer skills enhancement. Through the playing of online games and games downloaded via apps, enthusiastic young and budding players are rapidly familiar with how to send instant messages or emails to other players.
They tend to know how to get succinct information about games from the internet; they also know how to install, update and uninstall the online gaming programs to name a few.
However, little do they realise that all of these are limited in the domain of computer. Not realising also the serious impede it has on them, on their mind and on their body as a whole.
Additionally, it is widely accepted as mentioned above that playing traditional games contributes to the improvement of young people’s social skills. While traditional games involve human interactions in the real world; the human machines tend to expose them with virtual world, thus providing various opportunities for children to learn ways of effective communication with both languages as well as prime language (gestures).
In fact, one primary merit of traditional games is that it fosters communication skills. More imperatively, traditional games are usually played in groups.
It allows chances for small and young children to experience a repertoire of talents, skills and build on with their language acquisition competency unlike with modern games.
Quite significantly, all these experiences develop a child’s moral to fathom the need to respect others and learn how to cooperate with kinds of people unlike in virtual world of games.
Moreover, away from these serious concerns, a high proportion of traditional games consist mainly of full body physical activities which apparently develop a child’s sporting skills. In virtual world, we tend to see children sitting in front of and staring at the screen for hours and hours and gorging on junk contributing to them being highly susceptible to non-communicable diseases.
In contrast, the majority of these traditional games encourage an active lifestyle. All the games mentioned above, gaddu ghoda, three sticks, hopscotch, cat and mouse, tin paani, jhappo, pillo, quinny quinny who has the ball and inky pinky ponky involves full body movements.
In my opinion, I strongly believe that traditional games are still indispensable in children’s learning process, even much more essential than modern games, especially in this influx of digitalised modern era.
The curriculum development unit should align their syllabus by including a chapter on traditional games so that it does not die a slow death. The educators should oversee that all the traditional games which have been there for the past decade or more should be reintroduced to our children.
By contrast, modern games are developed by game companies for the sole purpose to optimise profits. Therefore, there is a considerable risk that children will be exposed to unhealthy contents, such as violence, immoral subjects, insidious acts and pornography, arranged in the games by such companies to secure financial survival.
As such, the parents and the guardians play a pivotal role in stopping their children from being exposed to such malicious activities, so that they are able to inculcate the right moral values in them and lead them to positive physical wellbeing.
In a nutshell, it is the educational functions of traditional games to help our children perform exemplary academically. In fact, the traditional games being played by our forefathers increased their lifespan duration quite substantially.
Children these days are becoming their own prey by overly indulging in the virtual world and not realising the repercussions of it. Traditional games should be, by no means, ignored by educators’ and parents’ with the advent of modern games.
More so, traditional games provide a play centre approach to the next generation to enhance a wide range of skills.
Modern games are of shortcomings in this respect. Parents and teachers should ensure that their children learn to enjoy various traditional games, rather than just collapsing on the frontiers of a screen. It is only through traditional games can children be ensured and enshrined an optimistic and healthy skills learning process.
Now the question plainly lies in front of you, do you prefer your children to sit in front of screens and gadgets and gorging on junk foods or do you want them to be physically active by playing traditional games?
* Ravnil Narayan is a lecturer in language and communications at the FNU School of Communication, Languages and Literature. The views expressed are his and not of this newspaper. For comments or suggestions please email ravnilnarayan@gmail.com.
