Are Playground Games Turning Deadly? A Concerned Headmaster Investigates

A fictional 1980s-style piece imagining how the press might have reacted to Squid Game.

When I took up my post as headmaster of Elm Road Junior School twenty-two years ago, the worst thing a dinner lady had to separate was a game of British Bulldog that had got a little too enthusiastic. This week, I confiscated a red felt-tip pen, a home-made paper doll, and a rope that four boys were using to play something they called “the tug game”, and I am telling parents plainly: something has changed in our playgrounds, and I believe I know why.

It is a foreign television serial called Squid Game, and, though I have not watched it myself, my staff and I have spent the past fortnight piecing together, from playground chatter and confiscated drawings, exactly what our children think it is about.

What the Children Are Saying

According to my deputy head, the programme concerns a group of adults competing in children’s playground games for a large cash prize, with those who lose being eliminated from the competition. The games themselves, I am told, are entirely familiar to any parent: a game of statues, a tug of war, a version of marbles, and a running race against the clock. It is, on paper, nothing more sinister than a school sports day.

What concerns me is not the games. It is the elimination.

The Playground Reports

Over the past two weeks, my staff have logged the following:

• Monday: Six boys in Year 5 organised a game of statues in the yard, with a self-appointed “referee” shouting at anyone who moved. When a smaller boy was “caught out”, the group refused to let him play the next game either.
• Wednesday: A tug-of-war rope appeared from nowhere, and a queue of children formed to take part, with losers reportedly sent to sit alone on the wall.
• Friday: A dinner lady found a hand-drawn poster on the notice board reading “WHO WANTS TO PLAY,” copied, we believe, from something seen on the television.

None of this, taken alone, would trouble me greatly. Children have always turned playground games into little contests of status. What troubles me is the language of exclusion creeping in alongside it: children speaking of being “eliminated” rather than simply losing, and a marked unkindness towards whoever comes last.

A Word From the School Nurse

Our school nurse, who asked to be quoted, tells me she has seen no injuries directly attributable to the games themselves. Her concern, she says, is squarely with the atmosphere: “A game of tug of war has never hurt anyone. It’s the boy sitting on the wall on his own afterwards I worry about.”

What I Am Asking of Parents

I do not believe a single television programme turns children unkind. But I do believe children copy what they see, and that a programme built entirely around winners and losers, played out for adults on a screen, is not obviously suitable viewing for a nine-year-old at half past eight on a school night.

I am asking parents to do three simple things:

1. Know what is on the television after the children’s programmes finish. Not everything broadcast in the evening is intended for young eyes, however colourful the packaging.
2. Ask your child what they are playing at lunchtime. If the answer involves the word “eliminated,” it is worth a further question or two.
3. Talk to us. Preventing Playground Accidents starts with knowing when a game in the yard has turned unkind; my staff and I would rather hear about it from you than from a letter home about a scraped knee.

The Editor Writes

We put Mr. Aldridge’s concerns to the local library, who confirmed the programme in question is indeed proving enormously popular with adult viewers, and to several other local heads, two of whom told us they had noticed nothing of the sort. We publish this report in the interests of a full and fair debate, and we invite readers to write in with their own experience of the playground this term.

Letters to the Editor, Local Schools Gazette, 14 Mill Lane. Please keep letters under 150 words.