I live right next to a playground and enjoy it. In addition to shouts of “Grandma, that stupid kid spit there again!”, you get to witness some extremely interesting playground games while you’re gardening. For example, the other day I watched a couple of kids playing Fortnite.
There were five kids with ten NERF guns of every size imaginable. At first, they just shot at each other, meanwhile punctuating the playground with joyful children’s screams, such as “You’re dead!”, “I shot you!”, or “I’m going to kill you all!”. It is this childlike, life-affirming attitude of the playground that helps me every day to get out of bed in the morning and give all the crap out there a chance after all.
At one point, the group came up with the idea to play Fortnite. There were no other kids on the playground at the time, making it easy to turn it into a “Battle Royale” island.
Four kids sat down in a centrally located, small hut, covered their ears and closed their eyes. Child number five took on the role of neutral referee for this round. Before it could start, it ran across the playground and hid the NERF guns. Behind bushes, on the roof of the slide, under a climbing frame and so on. When it was done, it gave the start signal and the kids were dropped over the island.
Like in Fortnite, the kids ran in different directions to find a weapon as quickly as possible. Instead of houses, they searched the different areas of the playground. The use of fists or non-NERF guns was prohibited, by the way.
Each child had three life points. A hit subtracted one life point. Now, to prevent the child who found the first gun from immediately taking out all the opponents, each gun held only two rounds. Thus, whoever found a weapon could subtract two life points from a person, but an immediate kill was not possible. More weapons had to be found or the available ones had to be reloaded.
The result was an insanely dynamic game. While two children were already armed and shooting at each other, another was running around collecting the fired ammunition to use for a hopefully soon to be found weapon himself. When the others ran out of ammunition, it was suddenly the previously unarmed child who took the lead when, thanks to the ammunition he had collected in the meantime, he was able to fully load his weapon and take out the first teammate with well-aimed shots.
A round lasted only a few minutes. After all, there were only four active players. Nevertheless, the game fascinated me with all its contrived rules. Of course, all this did not go well for long. Suddenly, two children wanted to be referees at the same time. There was arguing. One even threatened not to give the other a cake at his next birthday.
After about two hours of banging, running and yelling, the group decided to break up. It was time for dinner. They said goodbye to each other with the words “See you online later!” because after dinner they wanted to play some Fortnite together.
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