Playground games for the Nintendo generation
10 June 2009
Clapping and skipping games that are popular in the school playground are to be converted into Wii-type computer games as part of a unique collaboration between three universities, the British Library and Nintendo.
The ambitious project, which involves the universities of London, Sheffield and East London, will generate prototype games similar to the Wii sports games played with handsets that take the place of tennis racquets or golf clubs.
The development of Wii playground games, directed by Grethe Mitchell of the University of East London, is only one strand of a £600,000 project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Beyond Text programme.
The centre-piece of the project is the important collection of playground games and songs at the British Library: the sound archives of the renowned collectors Iona and Peter Opie. Researchers will convert these into a digital format under the supervision of Jonathan Robinson of the British Library. They will then create an interactive website for the Library so that children, parents, educators and members of the public can access the digitised archives.
The project's third strand will be a two-year study of playground culture in two primary schools, one in London, the other in Sheffield. The London school is in the multi-ethnic King's Cross area, close to the Library, while the Sheffield school serves a primarily white, working-class community.
This strand, supervised by Professor Jackie Marsh of Sheffield University and Dr Rebekah Willett of the Institute of Education, University of London, will reveal how playground games, songs and rhymes are being influenced by comics, TV, film and computer games. Children from the two schools will help to create the prototype computer games and design the library website. They will also co-curate the website, helping to select, describe and present its contents.
The project is being backed by the former Children's Laureate, Michael Rosen, who is a member of its advisory panel, and by Iona Opie, whose archive at the British Library is central to the research.
Dr Andrew Burn, the project's leader, says that the development of the Wii-style games will be technically challenging. "We will 'record' movements from particular playground games and incorporate these into playable computer games, ideally with songs and words," he explains. "This will require us to adapt existing hardware and design new software."
Dr Burn, who is based at the Institute of Education, emphasises that the Wii games will help to record and conserve playground games rather than replace them. "In any case, we are already seeing a migration of school playground games and songs into new media, such as YouTube, the video-sharing website," he says. "The oral games of the playground are a form of folklore and, as the Opies said almost 50 years ago, folklore, like everything else in nature, must adapt itself to new conditions if it is to survive.
"Gaming platforms such as the Wii are designed for physical play and are therefore ideal for producing games involving movement. They also appeal to a wide audience of casual gamers, with an emphasis on family-friendly content."
Playground rhymes are not, of course, always "family friendly", a point that Dr Burn acknowledges. "Playground culture does have a subversive aspect and sometimes the rhymes are a little more streetwise than some adults might expect," he says. "One clapping game currently being sung by primary girls begins:
"I'm sexy, I'm cute
I'm popular to boot …"
"So we are also interested to see how this element of playground culture can be represented on a library website," he adds. "It is going to be a fascinating project."
Nintendo will offer the researchers advice but has no commercial involvement in the project. The intellectual property will be retained by the university partners.
Further information from:
David Budge
(mob) 07881 415362
email: d.budge@ioe.ac.uk
Notes for editors:
1. "Children's Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age" will run for two years. The study will be based in the London Knowledge Lab, a research institution shared by the Institute of Education and Birkbeck College. The project will involve researchers from the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media at the Institute of Education; the Centre for the Study of Childhood and Youth at the University of Sheffield; and the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London.
2. The Arts and Humanities Research Council's Beyond Text programme is supporting a range of other projects looking at the part that different kinds of text play in different cultures. See www.beyondtext.ac.uk.
3. The researchers will be supported by an expert advisory panel of academics, game industry representatives and specialists in children's oral culture.
4. The project will culminate in a series of high-profile events: a children's conference in Sheffield, a conference for researchers, educators and policy-makers at the British Library, a demonstration of the Wii prototype at the BETT (British Education and Training Technology) show, and a book presenting the research.
5. The website to be created for the British Library will also provide access to parts of the collection of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition in Sheffield and the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture.
6. The Institute of Education is a college of the University of London, specialising in teaching, research and consultancy in education and related areas of social science and professional practice. The Institute conducts over one-third of the educational research in the UK and last year's Research Assessment Exercise judged that 35 per cent of the work it had submitted was "world leading", while much of the remainder was of international significance.
7. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It provides world-class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. Further information is available on the Library's website at www.bl.uk.
