 Running around is perennially popular among children and it usually has some kind of structure or set of rules that define it as a game. In a densely populated space, such as the school playground, running around can be a skilled activity involving weaving and avoiding, or not, people or objects. Many running around games involve chasing, the best known being the many forms of tig, touch or tiggy, which children are continually adopting and reinventing, such as tiggy off-ground, tiggy hide and seek, tiggy toilet, stuck in the mud and tiggy shadow. The opies recorded a host of different names for tig, tig, tag, tug, tig, dab, tap, he, e, it, catch, catchy, catchers, chasers, chase, chasing, dobby, kip, nag, picker, picky, run about, tig, skibby. Some running around games are played in particular places in the playground. In fact, children are endlessly inventive in adapting the opportunities of the built environment to chasing game scenarios, using black tarmackers, poison pits or platforms, poles, doorways and tree stumps as safe places or, as they often call it, home or homey. The opies observed, in chasing games, a touch with the tip of the finger is enough to transform a player's part in the game. It's as if the chaser was evil, or magic, or diseased, and his touch was contagious. These variations on basic tig belong to a wide range of chasing games which introduce dramatic make-believe and narrative elements. In one of the playgrounds we researched, an astonishing variety of characters appeared in their chasing games, including zombies, robots, monsters, witches, queens, pixies, unicorns and princesses. These had various properties for catching or protecting. One ingenious pairing was Jack Frost, who freezes you when he catches you, and Sally Sunshine, who releases you. Some more recent running around games draw on media influences such as Mario Kart's races, a playground racing game inspired by the popular Nintendo Wii title. Elsewhere, children have been observed roaming the playground, operating rules which are clearly borrowed from computer games such as stealth, where the child crouches low, invisible to imagined enemies, imitating the stealth mode available to avatars in popular first-person shooter games. In some ways, running around games are games of physical competition. More generally, there are other kinds of games that can be described in this way. One example is thumb wars, which is like arm wrestling but using the thumb linked with the opponent's thumb in a fist. Another well-known example is handstand competitions, where the one who can stay on their hands the longest is the winner. In each of these cases, the competition is preceded by a chance such as one, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war, and I am the strongest, not for the longest, under over Pepsi Cola, or earned d'ertoire for handstands. These examples all remind us that while children are adept at acquiring resources for play, one of their most important and abiding resources is their own body. The body can produce dramatic characters, cryptic signs, strange faces, all kinds of sound as well as language. It can also be used in more novel ways such as nose cracking, ear wiggling, fake double-jointedness, finger cracking, armpit farts, Chinese burns, and a host of other bizarre actions.