(1075) Traditional red seed shooting game

During the same trip as in blog no. 1074, I had a long chat with our cook. She is a few years younger than I. She grew up in Pahang in the village and I grew up in the city in Selangor, probably a distance of at least 200 km apart. The funny part is that we share a number of childhood games. Of course the Chinese called the game a certain name; she is a member of the Jakun tribe and she knew the same game with another name. Some rules vary, but we both agreed that we shared mostly the same games.

The sad part is that in the village near Tasik Cini, the children no longer play such games. They watched a lot of TV. Those who have access to old hand phones actually play hand phone games. While we may argue that games are meant to entertain children: what does it matter if one child play traditional games and another play electronic games?

I just came back from packing my lunch. On the way back I collected fifty red seeds from the ground around a certain tropical tree. Those seeds are red and kind of round. When I was a child. I spent hours playing a finger shooting game trying to win red seeds. Three girls of ages 6-8 would sit on the ground or floor outside of a house. The owner of the red seeds would release them gently to spread them out in the space in the middle of the three players. Since we could pick the seeds in school, we do not fight about losing the seeds to others.

Then one by one we would use our little finger to draw a line between two chosen seeds. One must be careful not to touch any red seeds at this point. Then one aims, and then using the index finger brushing  against the thumb to shoot one particular seed towards a direction of many seeds. One successful shoot may net the shooter twenty over seeds. Or a failure may cause one to lose what one already won. A failure could be one inadvertent touch against an unintended seed. Or the seed shot away touched no other seed. Such a game required many skills and judgement, it builds fine motor co-ordination. It may also create memory spaces, hooks or what I used to call registers.

Another thing that participants learned is negotiation skills. Three players may disagree on how many seeds moved, so it is up to the shooter to convince the other two that she actually managed to dislodge that many seeds. One friend I remember could recreate the former position of red seeds before the shooting, she would draw the diagram using a stick on the sandy ground in school. She was much sought after as a judge in this game. Looking back, I realized now that she had the perfect recall. After a while, we all asked her to sit in to adjudicate on the number of seeds moved. But as a player, she was pretty hopeless, she could not shoot to win seeds, turn after turn she would fail and touched seeds she should not touch. It was fun that should we play enough games, every child excel in at least one game so no one feels left out.