REQUIEM FOR THE ART OF PLAY
Where have all our joyfully created street games gone? Video-game companies have ended them, every one
‘Milk in the dairy.” “No money”. “Milk in the dairy.” “No money”. “Milk in the dairy…” “Money!” That’s it. That’s what we needed to hear to go and look for our friends. Milk in the dairy is like hide and seek. The seeker would call, and the hiders would respond. That last “Money” was all the invitation we needed to go seek. Only, our version took a bit longer. Because in Laudium, we didn’t play in one house. We played on the entire street. We had access to our neighbours’ houses — provided that some of their kids were playing with us — and we had access to the rest of the yards of all the other neighbours. Hiding could literally mean anything. On occasion, it could even mean that Mo from down the road got bored during the game and decided to go sit in his *ma’s kitchen for a snack where we would find him long after the game was done.
These were the kinds of games we played. But then, one day, Tshepo brought his blue cartridge to school. He showed it to me during break time when we were standing next to the rows and rows of concrete sinks we used to drink water from. My eyes nearly fell out of my head. There he was. Sonic the Hedgehog, bursting out of that cartridge label with his big eyes and spiky hair.
This cartridge was a special compendium of Sega Games that Tshepo managed to get his hands on. How? I don’t know. Would it work in any knock-off cheap machine? Yes. Did I want to borrow it and try it on my cheap knock-off machine? Definitely.
And here is where the story of the illusive Sonic the Hedgehog ends. You see, we were only allowed to play TV games on holidays, and seeing how school was in session and I had to give Tshepo his cartridge back before the holidays rolled around again, I would never get to test this magic compendium of Sega games on my cheap, non-Sega machine. I would never get to play a Sega game like the kids did on
KTV.
Yearning for Sonic is nostalgia. It’s the meeting of my thoughts awake with the dreams I had in and of the past: Just a regular kid, coming home after school, not having to hang up my school clothes
There is a certain gift that comes with growing up in an environment where you have to create instead of get
neatly and change out of them immediately so that they didn’t get dirty, and just maybe, having a sandwich and sticking my bum on the sofa and playing Sega. Never happened.
What did happen though was a lot of frolicking in the street and the making up of games and the great freedom we enjoyed in the art of pure play.
Marabastad had long gone, its dust settled with the last spinning top of little boys competing against each other in the yard — but this idea of “the location” followed my parents all the way to Laudium after the Group Areas Act, and it’s in these streets that my childhood became the gamified existence I long for still today.
When we weren’t playing Milk in the Dairy we gathered on Marble Street in a big gang to play Angush. All you needed for Angush was for one person to bring a ball, someone always had one, and enough people for two teams. There were always six or more of us.
Angush is like softball played with the legs. One team pitches, the other team kicks, and you can only kick the ball if your name is called. If you kick it anyway, you’re out. If you get caught out — full toss — you’re out. If you get caught by one hand, on one bounce — you’re out. You stay in the game by making runs between the pitcher station and the kicking station (like cricket) but … you are only safe if you declare yourself safe by saying “Angush”. Otherwise, you can get the ball thrown at you and … you’re out.
We didn’t buy games, we made them.
We still make them. Like that time at a B&B in Auckland Park when Sarah and I played a game called “ain’t no thing but a chicken wing”. It involved eating hot wings while lying in expensive sheets and aiming for the bin at the other end of the room. If you get the bone in the bin, you win. If you keep getting them in, you stay winning.
There is a certain gift that comes with growing up in a socioeconomic environment where you have to create instead of get. That talent is being able to play at life. That talent knows when to declare Angush, and when to hold back because the difference between those two is just about all you need to keep playing.
ANGUSH!
*Ma in this instance means grandmother.