Atishoo! Atishoo! We all fall down.

I can now add playing ring-a-ring-of-roses to my list of Silly Things I Have Done in Class. My course this semester is entitled "The Psychology and Philosophy of Games". Actually, I was just going to call it "Games", but I needed to put in some long words to discourage the "D" students from signing up. The first group of readings concern definitions of "game" (Wittgenstein is there, of course), so as a way of introducing the idea and explaining the course content I drew up a list of games that I would and wouldn't be looking at, and asked students to see if they could detect my criteria. Of course, being Turkish students, they didn't know what ring-a-ring-of-roses was, so I had them merrily dancing around. Maybe I'll play Chinese Tangles in the next lesson.

For the curious, these are the two lists.

IN: chess, go, poker, backgammon, D&D, GTA, America's Army.
OUT: football, roulette, bingo, boxing, ring-a-ring-of-roses.