Traditional Games for Youth of Indonesian People

Boys often own handcrafted wooden tops and hold contests for the longest spin or for knocking another’s top over. An ancient toy in Indonesia, tops often emit humming or whistling sounds and feature whirling attachments. Their antiquity and wide variation suggest that tops may once have functioned at divinations or life rituals. They persist in popularity and cleverness of design.

Some Indonesians hold a peculiar passion for kite flying. In Bali, kites shaped as dragons, gods, animals, and symbols fill the skies in the dry season. Masterly crafted of colorful waxed paper and bamboo supports, they take innumerable shapes with extravagant long tails. Some kites make sounds believed to echo celestial voices. Boys and fathers share in a love and construction of kites. Some contests involve attempts to bring other kites down, creating games of war. These “fighting kites” have no tails and their strings contain small bits of glass to sever strings of opponents. Boys develop strong emotional attachments to their special kites, as do men with their favorite fighting cocks. While pleasing their owners, kites provide imaginative, colorful, air-borne displays for all to enjoy watching.

Marble matches absorb boys as a favorite pastime with friends. A popular game involves a small circle drawn on the ground. Players try to knock marbles within the circle outward by using one marble from the outside. Each tries to knock all marbles out of the enclosed space, including his own. If a player succeeds in striking other marbles beyond the circle, but his own remains within it, he forfeits his marble. The object is to strike out marbles along with one’s own, then keep the other marbles. Boys enjoy collecting marbles of all kinds.

Across the islands children play with hand-made, painted cars and trucks of wood, plastic bottles, or even dried pomelo (like a grapefruit) skin. Usually made by male relatives, these toy vehicles often include details such as windows and seats. Children pull them along by strings. Some suggest “folk art” in their ingenuity, craft, charm, and color. As simple as they appear compared to manufactured counterparts, Indonesian children delight in them. In fact, many children happily walk with a small wheel on the end of a stick, a most basic toy. Ordinary Indonesians can rarely afford to buy many factory-made toys like dolls, trucks, or computerized games, yet their children’s lives seem none the worse for it.

Young girls play a version of jump rope using parallel “ropes” actually woven with rubber bands. In turns, each tries to leap over the incrementally elevating ropes until they reach neck height. Some talented jumpers are able to leap over these. As the ropes are soft rubber, girls are not apt to be scraped if missing a jump. They also play games similar to jacks, using shells, bones, or ceramic pieces. Most often, girls enjoy contests like hopscotch. They etch game patterns onto the ground, then hop on one leg using stone markers for their finish points.

Often children inherit festival decorations or crafted animal forms from rituals as toys. Javanese children love to receive the hobbyhorse-like props ridden by men in ceremonies. These woven and painted make-believe creatures add much to their imaginative play.

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