Murderball

It’s funny where we draw our inspiration from, but a recent column in Sports Illustrated about the decline of recess in the United States, brought about in part from fear of liability and bullying, has prompted us the revisit a conversation about one of our childhood games; Murderball. Originally cloaked in the nostalgia of youth, our new conversation centred around the construction of self-identity and the development of peer conflict-resolution strategies in children. As a side topic, there were also some musings on the relative prevalence of violence, or the threat of violence, experienced during childhood.

Firstly, Murderball. We did not invent, nor name this game, but learnt it from older kids at school, and were most enthralled by it around age 10. In Murderball, small groups of children throw a ball, usually a tennis ball, against a wall. It is allowed to bounce once and then is caught by another child to be thrown again. There are two pivotal moments in Murderball, the first being when someone catches the ball before it has bounced once. When this happens the original thrower races to tag the wall as the catcher hurls the ball back. If the ball hits the wall before the runner, then the runner must assume “the position”. Typically, “the position” meant standing facing the wall, as your compatriots lined about some ten feet away and proceeded to throw the ball at you. As we got older, variations were introduced to moderate the number of people who could participate in throwing of the ball. Furthermore, one could choose to face the crowd, with the option of attempting to dodge the ball and earn the opportunity to turn the table on an individual thrower. The other moment is when someone drops the ball. If another player catches the ball before it bounces, then all is fine, but if the ball is dropped and allowed to bounce, then the chase is on.

To us, it would seem that Murderball is a form on consensual violence. Participants often emerge from recess with welts and bruises. Even the name oozes violence. Many other games played by children also seem to contain a certain element of violence, such as early forms of unrefereed football, hockey, and soccer. In fact, during the turn of the last century, authorities in England attempted to ban unorganized soccer because it was perceived as too violent. Violence, it seems is never too far in childhood, at least that was our experience growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. There were always groups of older children who we could identify as physical threats to our well-being. Similarly, this view was reinforced by older images in popular culture.

With the recent attempts to eliminate bullying, we are curious whether this perceived level of violence still exists. Do children in fact feel safer from each other? Do children still participate in, invent, and play games such as Murderball? In our own time Murderball enjoyed an on-again, off-again relationship to the authorities, at times being actively routed out and tennis balls confiscated, while a blind eye was turned at others. We can easily see Murderball being proscribed as part of an anti-bullying campaign. However, we also feel that such activities help to form identity and conflict resolution strategies. The key point in Murderball not being the violence, but rather the unsupervised nature of the activity as it was a competitive activity in which all participants had no recourse to a higher authority. Any dispute that arose in Murderball could only be resolved by those playing in the Murderball session.

We are not saying that these skills are absent from today’s children, but rather we are curious as to how these skills are being developed in a climate that dramatically increased the role of adult supervision while simultaneously decreases the opportunity for non-technological play.