Current mood:	its all good
Current music:	freedy johnston- this perfect world

childhood game
There were very few children my age in the neighborhood i lived in so i ussually just played with two other kids that lived down the street. Since our group was pretty small, we didnt have a lot of gaming choices. Most of our playing revolved around this game we called "explorer". The game consisted of following somebody each day and exploring things that that person was interested in. When the person found something to do, (it went from throwing a rock to polevaulting over pigs about in places we weren't supposed to go to)he would do it and call the rest of us out to do it. Not doing would result in becoming a chickend and losing all sense of dignity. The game had pretty much no parameters and the only rule was that you had to follow what the leader for the day said needed to be done. For example, i remember making my friends roll down a hill in an old asphalt barrel and being forced to try to touch a bull's tail in a nearby farm (again, a place we weren't supposed to go to).

I think that the whole point of the game (even though we didn't realize it then) was to get to know our limits as far as strength, intellect and dexterity went. We ussually picked tasks which we had not performed before and tried testing our limits with them. We were also exploring the limits of the things around us. I have to say at times this was extremely stupid and dangerous. For example, I remember one of my friends throwing a bottle full of gasoline (we stole it out of the lawnmower) into a fire just to see how big the explosion would be. Needless to say we could have gotten killed. When we were somewhat comfortable with the things around us (by this I mean our yards and the surrounding streets) we started moving out farther and farther from our houses, our limits. This is when we started walking about 3 miles so we could go fishing and bother cattle and pigs at a farm we had no permission to go into.

Most things got old when we felt we understood them and had conquered them. For example, i remember that the farm lost all its allure after we found out the bull was very tame. However, the games helped us find our place in relation to our surroundings and most importantly in relation to each other.