The good old Five Stones

The Five Stones. A popular game which I used to play in my childhood days. During every school recess, when we were not out in the field or garden running and panting our lungs out, we would be sitting quietly in threes or fours playing the Five Stones. I particularly enjoyed playing this game perhaps because I was good at it.

S recently gave me a set of Five Stones. Looking at them brought back fond memories of the carefree joys of childhood, without a single worry on the young shoulders of mine. Well, except of course when I had to study for exams...

The idea of playing in those days was really simple and easy. With lots of energy to spare, kids got creative and found ways to amuse and occupy themselves. Usually inexpensive materials were used in the games. For example, Zero Point is basically just a long chain of rubber bands. Five Stones are made with green beans, sewed in pockets of cloth. Capteh is made of colourful feather with a rubber base. And then there are Catching, One Leg Catching, Eagle Catch Chicks, STOP etc. These games require no expensive toys, just plain raw energy and lots of running around. They were a good outlet for our excessive energy and kept us fully entertained. What's more, these games helped develop our social skills in schools.

As far as I can remember, I didn't have a doll or a soft toy to cuddle to sleep. Because I never actually needed those toys. I remember once, before my brother and I went to bed one night, we were sitting on our beds, pretending our pillows were slabs of meat. We were the butchers chopping those meat with our tiny hands for our customers. And we were laughing ourselves silly before being shushed to bed by our parents. In that era, we certainly didn't need much to keep us happy.

With a society becoming increasingly affluent, the needs and wants of its people and their brood change correspondingly too. Paper dolls no longer have their charm on the kids nowadays. Only Nintendo, PSP, computer games and whatnot cut it for them.

Instead of playing and socializing with their peers in the real world, these kids spend their spare time sitting in front of these devices, saving Mario or shooting in Counter-Strike in the virtual world.

I personally am not against compute games. With such rapid advances in technology, to come into contact with any kind of electronic gadgets at a young age is no longer evitable.

The crucial thing is the amount of time spend in front of these media, be it TV or computers and the content of the games and programs.

Apparently, playing computer games for long periods of time alone can cause reclusiveness and introversion. It can also give children a false sense of reality.

Another issue is the violence in games or TV programs. Violence can cause aggressiveness in particularly young men. Some children do not understand that when you kill someone, they cannot come back to life, as depicted by many video games.

Hence, I do not envy the role of parents. With a widespread of media violence these days, parents have a harder time than ever to protect their offsprings from such overexposure. Other than that, they would have to get creative and find ways to lure their children away from these media into the real outdoors.

For a game or two of Eagle Catch Chicks or Catching perhaps.