Let the children play

In a war-ravaged street in Mosul, Iraq, a dozen boys are filmed playing football. They run, scramble, shoot, dive in the dust, and occasionally hug when scoring a goal. Yet there is something heart-breaking about this football game – it is played with an imaginary ball. This is haram football, haram meaning forbidden, banned by Islamic State. In 2015, two years before the film was made, 13 boys had been publicly executed by a firing squad for watching a football game on television. The young players here are taking no chances; gunfire is heard in the background as the film ends.

Made in 2017 by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, it is one of a series of short films of children’s street games from around the world made over the past two decades, now part of an international travelling exhibition which stopped off at London’s Barbican in 2024. Impressively, the Children’s Games series is in the public domain and free to watch online, where it has become, according to Alÿs, “something completely and gloriously uncontrollable”. Having racked up thousands of viewings worldwide, it is now being used in refugee camps and child therapy practices.

Some games will be familiar to New Humanist readers – skipping, kite-flying, rock-paper-scissors, hopscotch, leapfrog, freeze (“grandmother’s footsteps”), “It” or chase tag – but others have emerged during war, civil disruption and in conditions of bitter poverty. In Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 2023, Alÿs filmed a group of young boys dressed in mock army fatigues, carrying handmade wooden assault rifles and waving down vehicles passing through their village. The cars are stopped and searched and drivers asked to pronounce a password, palyanitsya (a Ukrainian bread but also now the name of a military drone) – a shibboleth that Russians find hard to pronounce. This is serious play.

Children’s Games records both imaginative play and more rule-governed games. Alÿs cites the crucial distinction made by French philosopher Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1961) between paideia (“play”, ancient Greek) and ludi (“games”, Latin). Play evokes more informal and spontaneous forms of recreation, indoors or outdoors, ranging from a single child talking to an imaginary friend to a group of children building a sandcastle, or adults kicking a ball around in a park. In contrast, games are profoundly rule-governed, as psychologist Jean Piaget argued in his pioneering study The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932), where he concluded that even a game of marbles contains “an extremely complex system of rules, that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own”.

In elaborating and finessing such rules, children start by accepting them as “divine laws” but later realise they can be amended by common agreement. In this, they have gone beyond the foothills of moral reasoning in developing powerful sentiments of fairness and justice. In Piaget’s view, this is how “moral realities” are handed down from one generation to the next. It is how in some kind of strange alchemy, the morality of duty and obedience to rules allow “for the appearance of the morality of goodness”.

Children’s play rarely leaves a trace in the historical record, as a result remaining something of a blank page in cultural history. For Caillois, developing ideas first proposed by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s now classic study Homo Ludus in 1938, “Empires and institutions may disappear, but games survive with the same rules and sometimes even the same paraphernalia. The chief reason is that they are not important and possess the permanence of the insignificant.” Both assume that throughout history, and in all cultures, children have gathered together, agreed rules, played and dispersed, leaving little evidence behind, with the everyday world reinstating itself, becoming once again “an empty theatre”. Yet while they last, games are a form of bewitchment, a way of temporarily forgetting the difficulties of life and escaping into another world, sometimes within a magic circle or consecrated space which games such as “It” require.

If social history tells us little about children’s games, art history helps fill in the gaps. Pieter Bruegel’s famous “Children’s Games”, cited by Alÿs as a painting he “saw as a child and which really made an impression on me”, not only depicts 90 games played in the Netherlands in the 16th century, but is the most famous example of what became a genre of Dutch painting: the kinderspelen. Common to many of these paintings was the setting of such games in a public square, often against the background of a town hall or other civic building, suggesting a link between play and good citizenship. Alÿs cautions us against too much idealism however, reminding readers that “in most cultures, games are also the first moment of gender separation”. He notes that the games the girls in his films play are more collectively choreographed – for example “Nzango”, a set of synchronised dance movements accompanied by clapping which is now a national sport in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are also more likely to involve singing, much as girls sing more often than boys in British playgrounds.

“The playground agenda”

The dangers of seeing games as a rehearsal for adult life – which George Orwell satirised in suggesting that the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing fields of Eton – gained a new lease of life in post-war reconstruction, particularly in Europe. Civic leaders and town planners extended their remit to include managing and monitoring play as a discrete area of child development, requiring dedicated play areas where activities could be safely managed through design and even time-tabling. The end result was the “fixed equipment” playground, often subject to notice-board rules. In my childhood, municipal playgrounds were often closed on Sundays, the swings chained up, in respect for the sabbath. These spaces took no account of the fact that most children seem to prefer playing out of sight of the adult world, on back lots or waste ground, places which the planning professionals formalise as SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

“The playground agenda was compelled above all by the imperative of taking children away from the street,” argues architect Rodrigo Pérez de Arce, in a collection of essays, The Nature of the Game, published by Alÿs. He thinks that the world of street games and imaginative play outside the home – particularly in the cities of the global north – is a world already lost. By the 1960s Britain’s traffic planners had won the battle on the ground, with street play now remembered principally in the photographic archives, where local and regional documentary photographers such as Roger Mayne in Notting Hill, Chris Killip and Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in the North-East and Nigel Henderson in London’s East End left behind a remarkable legacy, often featured in the social affairs weekly New Society.

Meanwhile, sporting games for children are now more likely to be professionalised and managed by adults. The under-fives attending paid football training in my local park on Saturday mornings are not by any definition of the word “at play”. Bemused, desperate to please their parents, the children are being trained to accomplish outcomes not of their own initiative, but set by others. This is why most definitions of play start by pointing out that it is quintessentially a voluntary, unproductive activity, “creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind … ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game”, according to Caillois. Anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it another way, responding to the Alÿs films, defining play as a “way in which, in a collective, everyone raises each other up.”

The acclaim greeting Children’s Games caused critics to compare it with an earlier project concerned with protecting childhood experience as a global social cause: The Family of Man exhibition mounted by Edward Steichen in 1955 at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Containing over 500 photographs by 273 photographers from 69 countries, including Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Gordon Parks, Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson, it was widely trumpeted as a vision of hope for a better world to come. Opening soon after the end of the Second World War, it seemed to brilliantly capture the mood of the times, and as critic Winfried Fluck wrote of the exhibition, “photography has a special potential for transforming everyday life into a special moment.”

Not all of the photographs portrayed children. Others were of family life, work, war, the ill-treatment of refugees, racism and civil rights activism, but visitors claimed to have been most moved by the images of childhood around the world, and these soon became symbolic of the project as a whole. With record-breaking attendances at MOMA, replica versions of the exhibition then travelled the world for the next seven years, seen by more than nine million visitors in 48 countries. My wife and I saw a scaled-down version of the exhibition in London in the late 1960s, and bought two prints which we dry-mounted and kept until they faded.

Like many others we were also inspired by the exhibition’s proclamation of “the essential oneness of mankind”, announcing a new humanist world order. In their 2018 collection of essays revisiting the story of The Family of Man, Shamoon Zamir and Gerd Hurm, both American academics, claimed it was “the most widely seen exhibition in the history of photography” producing “the most successful photography book of all time”.

They went on to describe the international success of the exhibition as “a near universal acceptance of the show’s particular articulation of humanism and a confirmation of its faith in photography as a medium uniquely able to communicate across culture and time”.

The ability to play is at risk

They weren’t entirely correct, as the enthusiasm they described was not shared by everybody. French critic Roland Barthes damned the exhibition soon after its Paris opening in 1956. In an eight-paragraph essay, “The Great Family of Man”, published in Les Lettres nouvelles in 1957, and later to become a chapter in his best-selling book, Mythologies, Barthes decried the idea of a “universal human nature” as privileging nature over history, a view he described as “classical humanism”. Instead, he argued for a “progressive humanism” that looks for the injustices that underwrite the different life experiences of people across the world, bringing these to the surface as a stepping stone to political action.

Some queried whether Barthes had actually seen the exhibition, or simply based his critique on the surrounding publicity, claiming that his essay hadn’t detailed a single photograph by name, subject or photographer, even though the exhibition contained several by his favourite photographer, August Sander. Nor did he mention, let alone discuss, the one photograph that upended the presumed optimistic storyline. All the photographs in the exhibition had been black and white – except one. This final image, which every visitor saw on leaving the gallery, was an enlarged colour transparency of an H Bomb cloud blotting out the sky. In this way the exhibition’s rich evocation of a diverse world of peoples and cultures was end-stopped with a graphic warning of a potential global catastrophe.

The damage had been done, however, and in Gerd Hurm’s words, “Barthes’s review kept its position as a key reference point for The Family of Man in both the academic and the popular field.” This short essay effectively derailed much of the supportive early response to the exhibition, and other intellectuals fell into line. The initial enthusiasm was forgotten.

In their book, Zamir and Hurm examined why the hopes raised by the exhibition failed to be realised. It seemed timely again in the 21st century, they argued, since “the claims of humanism and universalism are open to new debates today, not only in ethical philosophy, but also in anthropology and biology.” Such claims are more urgent than ever, they said, given the rise in ethno-nationalism and the fracturing of inter-personal solidarities resulting from identity politics, both potentially undermining the “one world, one humanity” ambitions that the exhibition sought to foster.

What has occurred in the 70 years since The Family of Man first opened? It’s clear that the post-war project of a humanist universalism has been out-manoeuvred by international power politics, and the lessons of the Second World War forgotten. Furthermore, the battlefields today – whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine or Gaza – now encompass densely populated urban areas, where schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure are most at risk, and where women and children make up the majority of casualties. According to the UN, children aged 14 and under made up the biggest share of casualties in Gaza between November 2023 and April 2024.

Modern warfare is becoming crueller and there are many signs that “one world” humanism is in a parlous state. As Alÿs reveals, children still want to play, and will go to great lengths to do so, using the considerable power of their energy and imagination. But their ability to play is at risk – not only from actual physical danger to their health and lives, but from the psychological constraints put upon them, from society and conditions of fear and anxiety, much of which is exacerbated by social media.

Huizinga began Homo Ludens asserting: “we have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom.” What happens when this freedom is threatened by new forms of urban warfare and fundamentalist religion? “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man” is a phrase originating with Aristotle, though usually attributed to the Catholic priest Ignatius Loyola. All powerful ideologies, whether political or religious, have designs on children, seeing the necessity to inculcate them with their values from an early age. No wonder children seek somewhere safe and far from the eyes of adults to play and exercise their freedom, often choosing waste ground where they are “oblivious to the depressing background because of play’s enchanting ability to configure a world apart”, as Rodrigo Pérez de Arce argues.

Immersing oneself in Children’s Games and its footage from across the globe recalls a principle enshrined in the post-war exhibition The Family of Man, that protecting children must be at the core of humanist values. This means protecting their right to life, care, education and freedom from harm. But it also means protecting their freedom of expression in all its forms, central to which is the right to play. It is what makes us fully human.

This article is from New Humanist’s Summer 2025 issue. Subscribe now.