Let the Games Begin: Reclaiming and Relearning Play

When houses begin to fill with Small Soldiers products, parents need not neces­sarily worry. Satire is a taste that children have the ability to acquire. I want to challenge adults who sound like Roger Ebert when he opines that:

what bothered me most about Small Soldiers is that it didn't tell me where to stand—what attitude to adopt.

But here is a movie being sold to kids, with a lot of toy tie-ins and ads on the children’s TV channels. Below a certain age, they like to know what they can count on.

How do adults know that children want texts that have the degree of moral certainty and closure that Ebert suggests they do? Just because adults like Ebert do not like to play with possibilities at the end of a story does not mean that children will not enjoy play of this sort. The play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith argued that ambivalence is one of the elements that differenti­ates play from reality.²⁶ Play oscillates between mastery and discovery of the child’s environment and self-detachment and distance from that environ­ment as well as between tension and relief. There is always the danger that one pole will overpower the other and that play will be ruined. Ambivalence is one of the crucial terms of play that children learn to negotiate, at times tipping the balance toward tears and frustration while at other times toward exhilaration and hours of pleasure. If media texts offer children moral cer­tainty, this valuable characteristic of their play is weakened. Years later when political uncertainty confronts these children, now grown to adult citizen status, a rush toward certainty could mean death and destruction for thousands.

It strikes me that the largest part of the war toys’ problem falls within the purview of adults—the adults who make, market, sell, and buy war toys but, even more so, the adults who do not make time to play with war toys and their children.

If adults allowed children age-appropriate leeway to experiment and play in a controlled environment rather than tried to protect and shelter them from topics deemed upsetting or too mature, then children could learn for themselves what place war and militarism should hold in their lives. I am convinced that children are intelligent enough and that war is horrible enough that most would make decisions with which the adults in their lives would be comfortable. The necessary resource this scenario depends on is that children will have access to an adult who is informed and thoughtful regarding the issues of war, violence, and militarism. Given the far-reaching effects of promilitarist ideology, I feel certain that my readers will acknowl­edge that all children do not have access to such an adult, in which case one of the following scenarios is probable: the children live in homes where war toys are not an issue and are, therefore, able to go about their play lives as they wish, which, in the majority of cases, means reproducing the narra­tives and morals of dominant ideology; the children become influenced by peers who do play with an informed adult and their play lives are wholly or in part transformed; and the children live with parents who prohibit war toys and are unable to learn play styles that could help them cope with and negotiate the realities of war and militarism. The last are the parents who can most productively be reached. They are concerned about their children’s toys and play, and they are already sensitive to the unhealthy aspects of war entertainment.

The most egregious error parents who prohibit war toys are guilty of is the limited frame of reference they rely on when defining war toys.²⁷ War toys most commonly are comprised of objects that represent the means to conduct armed violence. This understanding of war toys grows out of a definition of war as armed combat between two or more parties in conflict. While these definitions seem rational enough, they are too limited for the twenty-first century. War in the current millennium includes economic sanctions that cripple and starve, national debt that forces a country into economic servitude, and environmental policies that damage a people’s land and resources, making life in their traditional way and space no longer pos­sible. Although humans may always have wars in which armed combatants face each other to do violence and destruction, more effective, wide-ranging, and socially acceptable ways to destroy a group’s economic, political, and cultural lives are far more insidious. With such an understanding of war, a miniature bulldozer could be considered a war toy as could play money or a miniature bank. Any element of global capital could be, and I would argue should be, played with as if it were a war toy.

Playing with a scenario in which a bulldozer clears rainforest lands in order to make grazing land for beef to be packaged in a Happy Meal opens children’s imaginations to the connections within which the world operates. Happily, bulldozers can also knock down multinational corporations in order to make room for urban playgrounds, and they can also push sand from one place to another. My point is that any toy’s location in the unjust system of global capital can be exposed and built into a narrative that chil­dren should be introduced to in age-appropriate measures. War toys are far from the only, or perhaps even the main, problem in the twenty-first cen­tury toy box. The most lethal problem is that we are raising another genera­tion who very well may be unable to recognize or negotiate the complex narratives and relationships that globalization and militarism facilitate. When Gil Mars suggests that Globotech export the Commando Elite toys to “some generals in Central America,” he is introducing the elements of cultural imperialism and militarism into children’s play vocabulary so that it may one day appear in their political vocabulary. This is a learning moment in Small Soldiers that parents can help children repeat and apply to other toys and play narratives.