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The end of dusty games

24 December 2009

Tshering Pem, a 27-year-old mother, is seeing a totally different generation of children growing up with a more sophisticated taste for games.

She belongs to the generation of modern Bhutanese children, who played marbles, guli danda, five stones, seven stones, and rubber bands putting cheap sweets, pencils and erasers as bets.

Empty spaces would be occupied by girls playing with lines drawn on the ground either with a piece of chalk pilfered from school or by making impressions on the ground with a stick. Children would be seen gathering at a particular spot after school and during holidays playing such games.

“The games we played as kids are seen no more these days. I don’t see children having fun like us,” Tshering Pem says. “They are more into fashion and other modern activities, probably because of television.” Times have changed, and ‘games in the dust’ have almost extinct.

This is the generation of Karma Gyeleg Tshering, 10, who loves playing video games ‘very much’. “All my friends come here and compete with one another, and our clothes don’t get dirty,” he says, sitting snugly in a video game parlour.

Development of indoor games, especially video games, enables any child to play any outdoor game indoors.

Outdoor games like football, car racing and cycling come beaming on the screen with the press of a button.

Thanks to technology, video games have picked up so fast among the children that physical games are almost forgotten. Equipped only with dexterous fingers, children sit glued to a seat for hours on end.

While some people claim that video games make children sharper and smarter with quick responses to stimuli, others are concerned about children’s health, especially the risk of obesity and eye problems.

With video games stations available everywhere in the towns, children are known to sell scraps and beg for money to pay for games. The popularity of video games has not only hit children, but also youth and young employees in the towns. Sonam Jamtsho, a young office goer, said, “I picked up this habit when I was in college in India, and since then, I have continued to play it to this day.”

A generation of Bhutanese, who gave up the old games, have picked up a variety of modern games for youth and adults. Popular among them are snooker and pool. Initially introduced in the country for moneyed people, now the games have come to be the source of income for many, including some who play the games on high stakes.

Meanwhile, even among rural youth, a football improvised with worn out stockings stuffed with rags has become less popular.

By Eshori Gurung

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Posted by Bhutan Observer · Filed Under Sports 

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