What is a folk game?

Sometimes referred to as playground games or children's games (though by no means restricted to children or the playground), folk games are games that are passed on by word of mouth and usually played in-person with minimal props.

Folk games are played in every part of the world, and often develop specific regional variations, in the form of different names or different rules for very similar games. As they are passed on by word of mouth and often adapted or modified in the process, folk games frequently embody specific, personal histories for their players.

What is this site?

This site collects a number of folk games collated by Niall Moody as part of his Game Design as Play research project at Abertay University.

The Game Design as Play project aims to research and develop games in which players are actively involved in the design of games as they play them.

Folk games fit into this project as an example of an already existing form where adaptation and modification of game rules is a natural, accepted part of the process.

A note on sources

I have listed sources for each game on this site. Note that these do not necessarily refer to the person or collective who originally created the game, but who/where I learned the game from. For those games I learned via the internet I have included links; otherwise I have named the person or book I learned them from.

Technical details

I have been documenting folk games as markdown files in Obsidian, stored locally on my harddrive (and mirrored to my phone using SyncThing). This site is effectively a public mirror of that Obsidian vault, with some custom code to transform the original markdown files into html. The site is designed so that I can just upload a new markdown file whenever I learn a new game.

License

This site was created (and will be sporadically updated) by Niall Moody

The site and its source code is released under the Anti-Capitalist Software License. You can read the full text of the license and its rationale here, but if you're looking for a summary, the important part is:


          This is anti-capitalist software, released for free use by
          individuals and organizations that do not operate by capitalist
          principles.

You can view the source code for this site on glitch.

Infrastructure Credits

This site is built on the following platforms, frameworks, libraries, and fonts:

Glitch - The web hosting platform the site runs on
Node.js - Javascript runtime running on glitch
Fastify - Web framework to serve pages from glitch
fastify-static - Fastify plugin to serve static pages
Handlebars - Web page template engine
point-of-view - Fastify plugin to support template engines like Handlebars
SQLite - Database used to store and search tags
markdown-it - Javascript library to render markdown as html
markdown-it-wikilinks - Addon for markdown-it to support wiki-style links, as used in Obsidian
markdown-it-hashtag - Addon for markdown-it to support hashtag links
sanitize-filename - Used to transform the markdown places names into a URL-friendly format
EB Garamond - Site font

Last Updated

This site was last updated on Fri Dec 30 2022 11:31:20 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)