How did you "play" as a child? Did you play like t

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"Playing" is subjective, and most children associate in some way with it.

Yes! I did the same thing! I collected cloth in boxes everywhere. I also did this with barbies long after others put the dolls away and outgrew them.

Myself like Funaho with the electronics, one difference is that I used to mix the
parts I didn't know how to use with ones that I did know how to use, making things
that half worked or did something, which I called time machines or something
else from science fiction. Occasionally it was cool to play with them with other people,
since it was called something from the future and you could turn it on and there would be
all kinds of weird lights and noise and stuff going on so they didn't need as much
imagination as I had to make believe it was all real.

I was very the “only one friend” type. As for my plays, and whether I was alone or with my friend, there was a lot of semi-standard stuff (pretty much everything, as long as it didn't involve anything remotely sports); but I used to be quite difficult with toys, because after a short while playing with them as intended, I almost invariably wanted to know exactly how they worked, or what were they made of.

I liked to make thigns as a kid. For Barbies, I made them clothes, hairstyles, "condos" out of my parents bookshelves, water parks with slides and swings and such in the bathtub, etcetera. I didn't do very much roleplaying. And I played with Barbies until high school.

When I was younger, I would pretend I was a horse. Later, after reading "A Swiftly Tilting Planet", I pretended I was a winged Welsh horse.

I played by myself a lot....

Me third. My mother said, I spent hours making clothes and dressing Barbies just to line them up on my bed. Never played with them per se.

I also had Fisher Price family and house and I also lined the people up and did these difficult sequences with them, but never actually played with them. I also spent massive amounts of time arranging play, but not much acutally playing.

I would have huge arrangements of Legos, that I would construct to my liking to span across most of the floor of the particular room, and nobody could change it or I'd scream like hell. They were my "video game designs" (this was when we had Atari) and I would stare at them for hours. Finally, my parents would arrange a deal with me so they'd take a picture of it, then I would have to take it apart. I was still reluctant, but no tantrum.

I also played a lot with Hot Wheels and MicroMachines. By about age 9, after developing a sizeable collection of cars outside the boxes, I started building for a couple years a collection (which by now is well over 200 cars) of cars kept in the boxes. I've recently started to revive this collection. Usually I would roll their wheels across the spines of bookshelves, run them into each other, and started writing stories in my head about them, personified. Thing was, I couldn't simultaneously create a story and play at the same time, so I would often when 8 or 10 lie down, spinning the wheels of the car, or lining them up thinking about possible stories.

When I was in Year 3 i used to not go out in the play ground and used to go into the hall where a couple of year 6s were making sonic the hedgehog comics and I used to join them making up my own stories in my comics.

I went to several different schools, and each one,
I always found 1 or two freinds who were always
unusual in some way, and excluded myself from the rest,
(or they excluded me). I did spend alot of time alone
aswell though, but I liked my world. Now as an adult, I'm simular,
I like to be around people, but often I can't be around people and
don't want to talk. (Talking was always a disruption to my
consciousness). Still I also loved nature, and still do. x

i remeber playing with my neighnours and i had to make sure we all had licences to ride bikes and everyone had a specific roles or occupations and they all had to wait for me as well

I was the same. I spent lots of time making, arranging and planning things on paper than I ever did playing. I had Barbies and a house for them, which I used to collect and make things for so it was as well-furnished and kitted out as possible, but I never seemed to get around to actually playing with them much.

In fact, now I think about it, on the occasions that I had someone round and they wanted to play with the dolls, I'd go along with it, but I didn't really know how to play with them. I couldn't figure out exactly what we were supposed to be doing.

I drew a lot. I used to use rulers and compasses and protractors to do very neat diagrams of fantastic new inventions, like robots to perform certain tasks, entire 'houses of the future' in cutaway drawings. All very detailed. 'Busy' pictures full of information with new things to find every time you look at them please me hugely in general.

I usually never played with anybody, I mostly enjoyed doing things by myself.

Yeah, my play style was mostly designing and building and creating. I never liked much dramatic play. A lot of other girls liked to play the damsel in distress theme, but that really bothered me. I was really afraid of thinking about someone being in danger, even an imaginary person, so I didn't engage with it. But I played games like tag and duck-duck-goose. And I liked parallel play while designing, unlike most of you that had to control everything.

I remember on the playground in kindergarten or first grade I wanted to play house with all the other girls. There was one girl who was the bossy leader, and she'd assign everyone their role. I always ended up being the dog. Once I was dubbed the "birthday cake". I got really sick of being told to be inanimate objects or play the part of something less important than the mom or the baby, so eventually I just started running by myself. I would run around the playground and run through everyone else and try to mess up whatever they were doing, sometime throwing rocks or trying to murder their "baby" they made out of pinecones or whatever they could find. Half attention getting, half lashing out because I hated that they were so different.

breakfastsurreal - that's sad but funny. 'You can be the birthday cake' - that's not nice!

This is an interesting thread. It seemed I played a lot more than most people here.

When I was very young, I used to play with balls and I used to give them all names. I also had loads of Thomas the Tank Engine toy trains which I loved. I had no interest in dolls and just had 'boys toys' until my sister was old enough to play, and then I wanted dolls because my sister had them, and I played with dolls with my sister.
I also remember playing with my dad by looking up animals in my animal encyclopedia, and then taking these animals to the vet (my dad). I remember saying I had brought in a python, because it had a lump on its back, and my dad said it had just eaten something big.

When I was at school, I made up different complex fantasy stories, and pretended I was a character from one of them, and got my friends to play other character or make their own characters. It annoyed me when what they did didn't 'fit' with the story eg. if their character seemed too much like they were from this world, or if their character didn't die if my evil character killed them.

I liked to collect things, but I still played with the things I collected.

There were periods say age 7, 10, 14 to 16 where i was completely isolated at school. At seven, it being my third school i stood against the wall and didn't move or speak, all break untiil the bell rang. I still have a dread of free time, intervals, breaks. Sometimes 'playtimes' were used to humiliate me and re-inforce the fact I was not a part of any community or social pecking order. Therefore forty years later i refuse to recognise any social group or belong to anything.

Playing or being at home was much different, I used books, my Dads workshop, even a keen gardener at seven. This led to electronics/radio, trying to construct steam engines, building radio gear, I was Meccano mad, gearboxes, cranes, steam drven vehicles, etc. Then it would be Sunday night agn with all that dread and the Monday was round again another week to be endured. The last two years at school I stopped speaking. I've been self employed a quarter century as I cannot work amongst others. Anyone else out there ditto?

Last edited by ablomov on 29 Aug 2008, 4:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.