we have monday off, and talk of how it's either called Columbus Day or Indigeneous People day or just.... "a federal holiday" because it's some sort of compromise, apparently
my dad got us those teeny beanie babies from McDonalds and i had an elaborate cultural structure for them that broke them into factions and also they were all at war with the other factions of teeny beanie babies
...I actually don't even have a concept of how one plays cops and robbers. is it just basically like.. tag?? some of you pretend to steal a thing and the other kids give chase???
it was like one half of the group is against the other half, probably involved some form of tag yeah. I don't remember playing myself I wasn't really interested lol
I distinctly remember playing pretend loosely based off disney movies with the kids at daycare when I was smol, and often bargaining to be animal companion characters since there was some odd silent agreement that nobody was going to play the villains
i played red rover once or twice with my church group but i think that was mostly the adults organizing it because they couldn't think of a better way to keep a large number of kids occupied and mostly unharmed
yeah I wanna say most of the time, if we were playing a game that involved some kind of roleplaying, nobody played the villain? the villain was just imaginary
LOL I remember The Boys wanting to play the villains in my childhood neighborhood group. which was one of my friends' brother and his friend. and then me and my friend played sailor senshi
But boomers think it's because POLITICAL CORRECTNESS HAS GONE MAAAAD and not because, y'know, those tropes stopped being culturally relevant decades ago
Some Native Americans still use the term Indians, but that is their choice to self-describe and not your manager's choice. And then there are some outdated names for gov't acts and organizations still in play that use the term Indian, but that's in reference to those specifically
cowboys and Indians stopped being a kids game after Hollywood stopped making made up "wild west" shows, and you can probably thank Mel Brooks and his movie Blazing Saddles for nailing that coffin shut
i've never seen anyone play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers outside of old media...also my senpai at work was reminding me about columbus day just today and my immediate reaction was wait is it still called that- (i didn't ask out loud though)
Yeah, exactly - those games were relevant back when they were big things in the media of the day, but those haven't been big things in the media of the day for over 50 years
Boomers who whine about kids not being able to play cowboys and indians don't know or care what kids today are playing, they're just whining about the implication that their childhood activities were culturally insensitive
But bitch, you haven't been a child in a dog's age, what you did back then isn't relevant now and no one is time traveling to your childhood to shame you for it
You have to disjoint your limbs in multiple ways to achieve that level of reach for things to be offended over but by god with grit and determination you've done it
I mean we have definitely had westerns in our lifetimes. True Grit, Unforgiven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Tombstone, Django Unchained. It's just...not the westerns our grandpas watched on tv or the Davy Crockett/etc era of tv that parents may have grown up with
The cowboys of today are just not John Wayne and are not uncontested "heroes" righting wrongs of the outlaw American West. I'm sure if I was more up on film history, we could say that the portrayal of the Cowboy in popculture has been forever changed since the Spaghetti Westerns and the cynicism of the 1960s/70s post Vietnam War but IDK
Pen Again
: This is extremely true, but also not a single one of those westerns was marketed to or expected to be watched by kids. Whereas, back in the day where as you observed, cowboys were treated as folksy heroes, westerns could be and sometimes were watched by a younger audience.
I don't know if any were intentionally aimed at kids, or if it was more that back then things like film and radio weren't really divided up into marketable demographics like they are now and the whole family was meant/expected to engage with the same content, but the result is the same.Kids saw westerns and emulated them to play heroes/villains.
I think it's fair to say that kids playing hero/villain games is pretty timeless, and what form the heroes and villains take is determined by pop culture. These days those games probably look like superheroes and supervillains thanks to superhero media like Marvel movies.
True Grit- grit is right there in the name! But yeah I think the only kid oriented western hero for our gen is Woody from Toy Story. And his story is about getting replaced literally and in pop culture by the space hero.
that just makes me laugh because my boss, like others in the place, is a big fan of disney, but apparently that little message went right over her head
even if my true desire was to play Hadesand of course barbies and stuffed animals with intricate societies like mentioned by others